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We smoke and only one sun sets why I remember weeks when suns would set one right after the next with a hundred full moons just for the effect kind of like fireworks at the county fair where you were busy with balloons, cotton candy, playing the girl. Much too busy with hot lipsticks, leather jackets, and fast cars past midnight. Way too busy to see the days pass like ice dumped in boiling red. What now? Christ, I don't know. She comes right through the window and I ask "where the hell've you been?" and she says "oh, there you are." She is yes lovely and goes for my throat her hands fingers nails stopping my air. "Don't ever say that again," she sneers and quietly reads the written words scattered helpless like the days turning across the top of the desk and the angle of sunlight holds us both the slightest bit above the floor as she begins to explain: You're too serious thinking this work is life. You're hot. What are you afraid of? Your clothes are strictly stay at home stuff. You've got to get out in this world. I hold on to her for dear life. She flips me sliding across the floor. She points her blade between my ribs, prickling my heart saying "How come you let me do this?" and it's a rat's hold I squeeze her love-handled flesh. She gives me her fast-car look and I slam on the brakes harder till she sweats out a tear till she begs: "Buy me a silver cigarette lighter." Oh what now? Christ, I don't know. A picture of a lover long gone flips to the floor, face smiling some final revenge. Luckily the phone doesn't ring. Suppose it were you, and I with nothing to say, listened and heard all those words you hesitated to speak: "I keep learning to live without you. No place on earth seems big enough. Whole new worlds explode right before our eyes. And you, stupid heart, nearsighted, eager for adventure, left me for everything else. Go sit on your headstone, wait forever. For all I care, go forget yourself. Go forget yourself." You're too serious thinking this work is life. You're hot. What are you afraid of? Your clothes are strictly stay at home stuff. You've got to get out in this world. Oh what now? Christ I don't know. The one I loved left your body. Your quick look, the way you stood, smiled, or couched yourself in a comfortable part of my heart. All gone right along with the wisp of your hair on the platform of a fast train to a place with a foreign name. Your favorite shoes, clothes, things dumped in Salvation Army bins. A badly done version of that song you used to tap and hum now just spurious debris on the fm. The twists of time've left your body -- fragments of the one I love spread out into so many: a lash here, the upper lip of a stranger, a scent, an implausible motion, a thought cast in the flesh worn by the crowd, cast in the flesh of someone else worn by the crowd. Oh what now? Christ, I don't know. I've got to get out in this world. |
Page Updated: 6/12/00