Twenty-five coffee pots
throughout these five rooms,
and we’re going to need them all
before the end of the night.

I used to get by
on my own just fine.

We both did.

There was always
something
to watch on TV.

The neighbors were always into werewolves.
Settling their communication problems
the old-fashioned way.

The moon was always bigger
than your Peter Pan perch at the closest
either one of us could get to the top of the world.

We were never bored.
There was never desperation
to pretend we weren’t sick
of listening to each other laugh.

Your car always started on time.
The kids at the movie theater
would let us lock up when we were finished.

There was so much you wanted to say
that it usually took twenty trips around the block
just to feel like we accomplished something.

I would wear that leather jacket,
even when we were right in the middle
of the June madhouse waltz
through a hundred degrees by midnight.

You would keep us walking slowly,
always looking straight ahead
and always touching my arm in mid-sentence.

I guess we should have been
in a bigger hurry for something to happen.

That might have done the trick.

I don’t know if it would have worked
any miracles with the damage the others did,
but it might have bought us a little more time.

Instead of you being afraid to leave the house,
or the way I pace around the kitchen and wash clean dishes.

We act like strangers or sudden car accident survivors
in our own living room,
and I’ve noticed that you’ve started drawing cartoons
on the walls again.

I’m going definitively crazy,
and you’re just making up for lost time.

But we can still agree
on what kind of music to listen to.

We still like and dislike some of the same things.
You’re still six months pregnant.
You’re still writing.
I’m still eager to see what you’ve come up with.

You’re as beautiful as the day I met you.
I have as many punch lines as when I started out.

It’s give and take,
and I guess we still have that in us.

01/30/2010

Posted on 01/30/2010
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