More Bad Ideas

My excuses to get away keep canceling
so I'm left with the real thing to come back to,
yet here too are excuses and who wants to wait for the bell to sound
announcing the start of the next level. For now, running in place is my position
in the training room, catching glances of others trapped by the ratio
of delicious is to walking or jogging. While I get older
and you stay happily between body and soul for now, take it each day I say
and you wonder about a time I'd teach you Japanese
when we have all the time to wander into languages and cafes
faraway from water, always just friends and walking, aerobics,
weight training, swimming in one lane together,
sketching and losing ourselves in film festivals, later taking trains
and sea routes north and south along the coast and inland
as long as we return in time to sleep in our separate worlds,
shopping for DVDs by the minutes listed,
clothing by the layers tucking our bodies away
and letting be all the excuses, the library a circle of cafeterias
and restrooms, study rooms to filter the good parts to put to use.
Now I've forgotten hide and seek, hiding behind pillars
holding up the airport, watching pretty lone travelers
shooting themselves with cell cameras
the way open hands used to prop up waves of one's hair long ago
at the cusp of Leo and Virgo, an audience in the offing
eye contact from a turquoise fountain.
The let-downs never end. Why bother—
stuck in this too long too old, one says; too fast, another;
too musical, one; too sad, too sissy, too bouncy others
would hold me to my category, still me and save me, ensnare me
and market me just when I want to leave me, everyday have a new me
to talk it through, keep this up, postponing, excuses,
having all the time in a world of one day finally touching.