I want you to write about me,
and it’s for obvious reasons,
painfully,
blatantly
obvious reasons
that I’d like you to use blue ink
and the notebook you keep on a chain
that goes over the balcony of our eleven-month-
a-year-hotel and into the ocean a few hundred yards away.

One of us is going to die in this hotel of old age,
and it won’t be anything related
to that song we both like.

This is no time to be picky. You can write a journal entry
or put it work in a poem and have contradictory thoughts
and feelings face off on opposite sides of the page.

It can be a careful attention to form
or a short story where the words are furious
at having to pull an elbow out of their throat
or a curve from between their eyes.

Love is fine,
but hate and a complete disregard
for the way we turned streetlights into cameras
that destroyed the film when it touched oxygen
would be okay, too. I’m not sure which one
I deserve more. Something tells me I’ve made you
cry entirely too often when you consider that
once is too much to begin with.

A little bird turned into a fairly disturbing
cartoon cut-out and told me that I’ve let you down
so often that you had to invent a secondary sense-of-humor.

You laugh when I’m not around
to make it possible to stand how much
of the bed I take up.

You’re patient enough for two or three
people to have dozens of unrelated faults.

None of that is lost on me. I aim to work on
everything and prove
I can be serious about gratitude, but I’ve gotten into this thing
where I take five-hour naps in the afternoon.

The time doesn’t actually move forward,
but I never recover from one memory or the other
and lose the legitimate afternoon and evening
trying to get my eyes to focus on shapes and sounds
that are actually there.

You could write about that,
if you like. You could deal in hope
or just tell knock-knock jokes that don’t mean
a thing to anyone but the two of us.

I’d love to hear about the time
we both woke up at five a.m.,
ignored the way the rain outside
fell as though it was addicted to the anticipation
of finding a broken power line
and failed to kill our winning streak
at knowing what the other was saying.

That’s one of those good intentions.
That’s when
everything
got interesting for the better.

01/13/2010

Posted on 01/13/2010
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