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