Your debut album was called Wild Hearts for Desperate Beginners,
and I have to admit that I laughed my ass off
for about fifteen minutes when I saw that on Amazon.com

I just think you could have come up
with something better. There’s still a part of me that believes
that the woman who collected car accidents the way
a five-time widow collects antiques should be capable of settling
for a better indication of what she’s screaming about on six tracks
that run about forty-five minutes apiece.

To be honest I don’t believe for a second
that you can play the piano and stay honest when you’re splitting hairs.
I don’t think you can shoot wings out of your back
or be of any real help when someone is hanging from
the window of an apartment building that overlooks the one place
that proves the earth is actually flat.

Fifteen minutes of laughing,
then I saw you on the Late Show
and didn’t think it was all that funny anymore.

The audience really got a sympathy kick
out of the way you kept your hands in your lap
and didn’t want to name names.

Your hair was a different color, too,
and your arms were covered with tattoos of names
of people we avoided like the plague.

When we were in love we didn’t waste any time.
Old friends dropped like airplanes loaded with flies.
I can’t even remember how many of them
either died young or moved out to California to get real jobs
entertaining at children’s birthday parties.

We ignored everything,
traded body blows in every room in both our house
and the neighbor’s and even managed to miss
every important political event of the last five years.

I never suspected
you were interested in trying to write yourself,
and I was always in the habit of checking the internet
for any pen names that might have been yours.

You were creative. You took a wait-and-see attitude
to whether or not the day was worth living for
right down to the last second.

I liked that. I still like it a lot more
than the tattoos and the sudden attack of nerves
dominating each of your seventy-two public performances
that occur in a give-and-take day.

Neither of those things really do it for me,
but I have no desire to call and tell you why. You’re more
than welcome to wonder about that on the follow-up.

10/09/2010

Posted on 10/09/2010
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