stories are true

Blasted blasted sex appeal

-ed to me over the roar of baseball crowds

and I don’t even like the sport

or its kneeling congenial heroes.

No one’s ‘picking our business’ quite when we need it.

Now! Stop us now, madame! or disaster

delightful flaming Hindenburg disaster

because small talk is so small as to be actually indiscernible

and whatever interminable inability to be frank

plagues us with so many pseudonyms

James and Magdalene and Galbraith

we shall be reinvented!

and yet this fluttering, dying cinematic love

and yet

and yet

let yourself be swept and away and just trust, my dear

who is nearly as estranged as the angels that flick

tomato juice, tomato seeds (some sick joke?) all across your

back and I pick them out with thumb and forefinger with

a gentility that you do not resist.

Cowardice! collapsing communion sends tight and tightening

vibrations up and down the string you led me on

that my timorous soul reveling in some small surge of romantic

dialogue? narrative? victory?

still true, but Pyhrric.

and yet

here my cosmic helplessness reifies with stinging rapidity

and I scream in my screaming box and weep

on my silicon shoulder

because your anesthetic breast is cold.

My prayers only - Oh God! - echo in that tempestuous cavern

of what the hell, woman? A large place

infested with fettered sadsacks and I

as exceptionally displaced as the gleaming porcelain corridors

that somehow I know you’d hate too,

and yet brevity is not loveless

and not lifeless, so don’t tell me you felt nothing but calloused

cautious hands on your skin.

I hope you didn’t want poems in your honor

but I feel things and I’ll tell them to the most interesting person in the room

that could be you, but it’s not

and yet