all the shit we put into it- Tuesday 9/12/2006

Sometimes smoking cheap cigars and sipping cheap merlot,
alone in some corner at the bar,
I still think about you and can't help but
fixate somewhat on the whole thing
and where it all went wrong.

Yeah, there's the good times
like making love night after night under spray painted light bulbs
with that window unit humming and hanging there remaking the air
that we came together in. We laughed and fucked and never let go
of one another and talked in hushed tones about one hundred million things,
and it was as though we lived on the edge of it all,
and that it would always be like that, apart from the world, together, no one else,
doing it all and making it happen.

In some agendas though the gods are surreptitious,
cold quiet fertile rooms never more than Harvest moons.
Spilling life into you. Pulling life from out of you.
One time. Two times. Three times.

What are all these things we cling to?
This madness, this linear nightmare of crashing moments
racing fate, and rotted ideas. Cracked and silly promises
Wistful blinks of eyes and belly kisses.
Love like a struck match, like refrigerator scarred doorways.
Like drying dishes. Like time clocks. Like pastel towels.
Like broken telephones. Like poolside. Like rats on wooden floors.
Like lightning storms, Like scorn. Like sperm. Like self-help books.
Like mortgage. Like desperation. Like empty gestures,
repeating words and vacancy eyes.

You were like this. a puff of smoke, a sweet wine.
You were everything there ever possibly was.
You were my guts, my heart, and my balls,
but mostly, you were a hell of a lot of work.
And it was hard work. Without break.
It never got easier, only harder all the time.
Work for it. Work for it. Work for it.
Every breath a demand. Every thought indignation.
Every effort, every word an assertion toward
Self-securing control lacking in honest self-reflection.

With all the thousand things you were.
With all the thousand things you could have been.
You never ever could let go of those things that made you
so much less than what you were.
Something special.
Something actually worth all that work.
Big build up, Big let down.
In the end you failed yourself,
but even worse, you failed me.