Love Story #9

1.

When you met me I was still counting windows

in all the boys’ houses one two three four.

Only to explain a way in which I am autistic.

Tapestry. I think you said

you left me behind in the hot air balloons,

cords dangling, latent gossamer pilling

on my new sweater. You said it is too busy.

Last night, wishing I knew more

about chemistry. Gazing at a shoebox,

you are breathing. Watching the movie,

you realize we are all going to die. You miss

the cherry from the cordial.

Never a hand to say I’m sorry. A door

you could have opened any time, so many

times we rode in your car. Spend it with my firstborn,

you know you need just rethink it and realize

she has her reasons. She flew United.

Just in time, bottle opened or she is

having eye surgery. C—remembers he needs

glasses. Everybody’s having it done, even

the poor ones. Says nothing. Have you traveled?

We used to live inside the arm. Held aloft,

it was warmer when he was sweaty. Representing

each moon in orbit, the popcorn pieces

only surrender emotion to a rational solution.

Why all the money? It’s just a sweater.

Not knowing the measurements, and each other

precision takes too long to imagine. Done by hand,

or should we say, by eye. No machines to diminish

this process to automation and affordability.

Consider what it means to be in reach.

Too long spent saying I love you

while touching any and every difference.

His weight the presence no need to label

what came before and after

you already knew, wondering if it wasn’t, too,

any good thing about a glacier melting.

More and more, you realize you need

a life without the internet and battle machines

presenting their influential livery for everyone to see

money’s inhibitions forget nowhere and nobody.

A story about what you loved,

a story I want so much to tell you. But, too late,

learned too late and leaving only my stomach

to churn with regret for hate and misplaced love.

2.

Day edging into evening passes, Midwestern shades

and all weather visible from your balcony. Abandoned

city light flashes automatically for several months untended.

In darkness, broken glass below becomes glowworms,

uneasy shards glinting mirrors all the wrong shades

of metallic yellow before the moonlight. Thoraxes

purple at dusk and jet at midnight, all while the light

goes on flashing, me or him smoking and watching

the bugs flight, remaining eerily unmoving.

My eyes saw what my hands did in the car

humming lines the kids’ll never know.

References running through my head the way she

collides over the slits of white paint. Gleeful

-ly ignorant, she glides state through state

without compensation in tow for her victims.

All unknowing, their driving, just wanting sushi

at discount on Wednesday from the local grocer.

Although, each store was a chain of some or other

franchise, family conglomerate, feeder into body

of a corporation. There are rumors they war, some

supermarket mafia. We imagine the bodies, stacked

between Progresso soup cans and aluminum pie tins.

Through many nights, they lie rotting. Reminders

of the avarice of their aisles.

Millions of conversations permeate themselves viruses

across the Amtrak map on the executive’s wall.

All places touched by your voice, even as eerie to think

years after we last spoke and to never speak again,

dialogue continues. Dialogue, I mutter, pages loose

and living aside. So much for that, stricken by memories

of my aversion to prose and it’s need for more

than my simplicity. Voice box, I held a workshop once

intricate in nature and failing to accomplish much.

Nothing but words to the wall, and indeed in time I did

do this and that to pin bits of scrap and stamp post-its

across the spaces above my desks, thinking it would aid

in the geometry I believed was structure. C—

Silence murmurs as wind, unsettling the way it cuts

my jackets off and leaves me still cold. I thought I was more

prepared than this, I thought I had gloves. Somethings,

you know, are better left forgotten. Our electric game

we play in your living room by the new sofa. Woeful,

bird lowing in the night, disorienting sounds mixing

with esophagitis and the knowledge the nearest cow

sleeps fifteen miles south. Game escalates, becomes drama

off-Broadway. Nylon sting. Wondering when the cops

will be called. Foggy, I stumble away and exit through

the stage door, into my car, and drive away.

Although, in the dream I don’t return, in reality, nearing

midnight, the light still pulses. At times furiously, hopeful

as death throes to extinguish, but then churning into slowness

again, our neighborhood misery restored. Much like that yelling,

or the echoes in back woods behind the house, in childhood.

This time, it’s your mother screaming something to do with socks,

left on the stairs or abandoned before washing. What stands

out into the noise of nothing is the cockatoo, callously spitting

her words into the back yard for all the other houses to hear

into their soup, whispering rumors and telling stories over

through the next day. Diurnal mystery of the neighborhood.