What if, when you die, you get stuck

in one of your old dreams?

 

Like the knotty one where you

keep telling me, “There’s so much

I’m not telling you”?

 

I’m thinking of us at City Hall,

combined,

dancing—

 

With four sinister feet . . .

 

The best citizens lined up in a parade

to gawk, and grin, and hear

me

serenade you.

 

Hear me

say a prayer:

God, excuse

their grins.

 

Me, in black; you, in off-white.

We don’t want to show off

anything too bright.

 

Anything enters Everything, spits out

Nothing to do with your empty-ball fantasy. 

Mine’s of the past:  If only an ear had fallen

off during the third act

of fucking

hacking

heckling the entire art form,

we’d both be better off.  You,

in touch with cold reality.  Me,

not wasting my warm breath.

 

They’ll all consider us hot-lucky—

you and me, the type to go out

from the town, plucking peaches,

picking cherries, choosing—

 

The eyes from mimes, while

they’re love-faking, taking

the time of their cheery lives.

 

I’ll work, run errands, sing

sweet nothings till the day

you lie back and conceive . . .

 

You’ve got to be kidding me; I’m

crying:  Douse the damned muse!

Put her on the fucking pyre,

for making me sick.

 

We’ll forever stick together, never argue,

grow old and gray, ever closer . . .

 

The words that I say and have said, however

I’ve said them, may as well be glass-eyed dead.

Clark, here—he clearly can’t hear—

is a perfect specimen of that special man

who, when speaking to his once and would-be

lover is speaking only to himself, debating

negation.  I have a dream . . .

 

Indulge me . . . just one last time.

 

Yet another origin of a boy

without a mind, only a brain made up

of an orgy of gray worms, words that matter

less than the body decomposing at my feet.

He’d never listen nor let me go, so

I stuck the stem into his dreamy eyes,

and rose from the occasion.  He can’t exist;

but he still insists on wishing us together.