1728

We went running down the hill
Looking at the pictures in the gallery
Shopping for music and new shirts
Turning on the cable
And moving across the water
From website to website
Driving the whole way in the passing lane
Subscribing to every magazine
Going to parties every night but Tuesday
Trying all the liquids and powders
Jumping right into the deepest arguments
And falling in love with each other
Every night for six or seven months

On the way back from lunch with Chris
Back from the auction of his grandfather's stamps
In Hong Kong he looks good he's writing a novel
I stop at Chase to deposit my check
I've been old fashioned since the company
Overpaid me by thousands of dollars my first month
I see the words Taskin Mumcuoglu on a desk placard
And hear Al Green singing that he's still in love
I don't think I've heard anything so beautiful in a bank
Since my second mortgage

And what is all this about love anyway
I'm feeling cut not bleeding but explosed
Like the electrical and plumbing
Of a building that's been struck by a large object

Love this terrible unbeatable team worse than the Yankees
Always in the media always up and down
It can never do enough to please its owner
Except win every time and we all have to root for it
I don't want to I never have I've always wanted
The impossible come-from-nowhere story
This is as the English teachers call it my tragic flaw
But it's September and my time my team is doing
Either what it always does or what it does
The year before it does something amazing

I don't want this love anymore it's what
It's so cruel always looking like that promised bliss
Then turning out to be everyday life my life
Don't get me wrong I prefer living
I go to the magazine stand it's the middle of the world
Assembly no new NewAfrican the Southwest Review will do
I pick up two more sets of MegaMillion numbers
As I tend to when the jackpot is greater than 100

By everyday life I mean war hot and cold
I mean I'm not asleep in history class
I can see the smoke rising from the field
I can understand it but I can't understand it
I enlist I show up I have faith in the leaders
I'm wounded they send me back to the front

Metaphors are for the truly stupid
And I am for metaphors
Too what too crazed scared or just tired
To articulate what I imagine of your experience
Too slow to know what to do with my analysis or yours
Not slow but possessed of a misplaced faith

People of the future, we knew in advance
About the flooding, the heat, the die-offs

Knew in advance that we were waiting too long

Still I for one believed
In truthfulness compassion forebearance
Whatever those are or mean
When you don't control capital
I don't control capital
I can barely manage to tell capital
What capital's frantic confused footsoldiers
Are seeing on the ground

It's not good it never is
Except at the end of the teaching day
Throat hoarse, back tired top to bottom
All that talking taking effect
Over the following hours and days

Let's don't call it love anymore
Even though I would say that's the best name
Let's make the feeling strange again
Less of an obligation, more of a sweet
Brimful clacking unto the roofslates
That what has started goes on through absence
Like light through space ok that's corny
But it's true I feel warm in your presence
Like a cat following the sun
On its tour of the windows of the house

Metaphors are for everybody to have enough
And similes are wandering the land
I'm not wandering I'm sitting at my desk
Putting one foot in front of the other
And you today are all about revenue

In your unguarded moments you have a different laugh
In your kitchen you have a ladder
In your bedroom you have a self-portrait

You ask me what I want to tell you
I can answer that, how much time do you have
It may take fifty or sixty years

A beautiful city is built on an earthquake fault
Or underwater, or on a harbor, same thing
When the world gets hot
The people of these cities live every day
With the intensity of survivors

They call it a fault but it's just the earth changing
They say "myth of Sisyphus"
But we're just getting up every day
Waiting for this monster we made up
To come tickle us to death

I'm alone it's ok I'm collaborating on something
That makes the motorcades do their Three Stooges whoop

Just doing one thing and then another
Which sometimes turns out to be
The first thing's next part