This one doctor once told me
that the secret to happiness
is more sexual-harassment lawsuits
than you know what to do with.

I didn’t really agree with that.
Something tells me there’s better ways
to be loved, or at least better ways to know
that not every romantic disaster is a bad thing.

Something tells me
the constant, dreary news of the steady doomsday
is worse than anything a woman has ever done to me.

That’s probably from a book. Or a movie.
Or a thirty-year-old tribute to meltdown desperation
screaming someone else’s great comedy
out of a comfortable car built for a small funeral.
Hoping to prove you can get to Hollywood
by driving backwards every mile of the way.

I haven’t trusted my own best lines in years,
and I haven’t met a saint in just as long.

Good people,
absolutely,
but no one I would trust
to save me when my room is suddenly a hundred miles
of wide-open anxiety in every direction.

And I don’t even want to know how far
it would be to a room with a rope
made out of bed-sheets, and a window
that can stand up to the cheating weather.

Let’s save all the bad news for Christmas.

And that doctor?

We spoke for a while,
then he checked the straps
keeping my wrists tied down,
and sent me on down the elevator shaft.

His methods have since been proven sound.

Fifteen stories,
and fifteen years
just to reach the second floor.

The rest of the way
I walked.

I would have landed sooner,
but I think something happened
along the way.

I don’t want to lie about it.
I’m cautious with anything that leaves me
waking up
with a weird kind of sadness and not so much as a stickman
to draw on the board.

Bad dreams I can handle.
The impossibly fantastic is even better than July 2007.
That sadness is something else entirely.

It makes me pay attention
to that cheating weather.

10/04/2011

Posted on 10/04/2011
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