It serves you right
to love me for
the rest of your life
as a woman who
suffers only from too much good taste
and a great sense of humor.
Your daughter thinks I am funny
with nose and glasses as comic
as cartoons that are the flights of
talking birds shaped like phones and seltzer bottles.
Your ex husband thinks
I am a smart guy and his wife wishes
that she and I were on a train in a movie
in another country speaking a language of
love in the luggage car with syllables and
glottal clicks that are brutal even for our alphabet.
Everyone likes the cut of my jib
except me and the wind in my sails,
Ill winds blow around
the inseam of my trousers,
Internet browsers cannot find
pages where my name was posted,
I am checking the lampshades,
looking for a camera,
tapping the walls of the houses and hotels
to make sure that it is more than a paper Mache set,
nights are swimming lessons across the sheets
and movies of the mind
that has both of us on stage somewhere
with scripts in hand
reciting the compressed poetry
of the latest laureate sensation
who has done everything with
their verse except take you ought of this world,
I mean, I think I rocked your side
of the planet just a little,
you thrashed through mine
and left me yowling
amid turned earth
and pulverized brick
for a moon that never sets
or soothes the habits of my thinking,
I dream too much about falling down
on a job that is better than minimum wage,
your daughter shows me her poems, kisses me on
the cheek, says she loves me,
I am destroyed, every mask is cracked,
it is as simple as being in the wrong place
when an assassin decides that, it is time
to go to work,
You tell me you love and
settle in for the night,
all your work is finished, every detail is written out and
entered on every line on all the forms the government office sent you,
I turn pages of a magazine, half lines of things I think of writing
down turning like pinwheels,
the machinery never goes off,
I say that I will prepare the coffee for the morning
and wonder who I am
to be in such a life
where everything is fine and fits like
tailored clothes except my skin
which crawls with a notion
that something is always about to go wrong.