Poems for You (3) -- Long Summer

Can a couple call it a day over a lack of cuddling, rolling away
and leaving the other end ringing?
Some days I’d like to fall in love again
just to sidestep the roundtable that binds us —
we’re as bad as doubles — get under our skins.
Even if we did roll on off
the push-pull magnetism of each trial run wouldn’t last
as more sheaths of bewilderment would be taken away

while we are down here waiting,
overhead the holiday of hands roams high in the sunshine.
Sure it’s not all silly romance in the sense of bouquets
of roses spiced with baby’s breath and peonies —
those come at an even prettier price away from the outskirts
riddled with dim neon and gravel parking lots announcing lone guests.
So many exile themselves to the orbiting Money-Tree
we all try to avoid, always just paying off another addition
like the neighbor’s Methadone, your McDonald’s, my recovering
seas of sadness. Luckily we reside along ear-to-ear spectrums of sadomasochism
come to interrogate our puttering about in involuntary removal of whatever is blocking
the illusion of a highway leading into a perfectly horizontal horizon
with only a haunted anomaly or signs of visitations to guide us,
towers from a taller earth, before the floods came to clear the slate,
new hope and rainbows that even you might like me,
of a mind, drawing nearer an earful at a time, sneaking up this way
with one of us to blame, leading the way or pushed along like a doggy on the moon.


July 3, 2008