Summer Weekends

11.28.2006-1.1.5.2007
For Rebecca Allen

summer weekends
should sweetly stick lovers in the anxious embrace
they have held for days
and when the constraints
of minute hand and second hand take reprieve
the resulting cataclysm of hips and tongues
should shake the foundations
and wake the neighbors

but today, I wake alone
she loves me more
but loves him now
-- in this western desert town,
we take what we can get
because the dreams are better
then the lonely surrender
nd nothing is worth moving to the eastern cities

I'll take momentary happinesses
to stand close to her warmth
press my nose to her blueblood figure
and inhale that which may be mine
if the mathematics of time
and the chess of bodies puts her close to me
a wisp of imagination
outweighs all the metaphors for surrender

I wish I could share an honest moment with him
speak without the inferences of it in his suspicions
tell him like a prophet
but he has a poet's envy
but such things are not meant to last
because her belly burns for more:
a lush pen-in-hand interp of her punk rock passions
and non-segued speech with a loose-cannon tongue

she'll find her way home
when the vacation loses its summer glimmer
"hold fast, hold fast, hold fast
to the dreams of her"
the manta repeats cyclically
she's not that far
in this town has a thing for reincarnation
it's all B.S., I say,
but the desperation holds onto anything it can reach
and I'm at that place now
the groundskeepers always have kind words
and escaping from the longsleeved, buckled jackets
gives me something to do

shame's a silly thing
disappearing once you stop believing in it,
and instead enjoying playing cards with Santa Claus
a chocoholic bunny
and a winged dentist
with a penchant for baby teeth

hold fast, hold fast, hold fast,
time's a measurable variable,
solve, then counter,
and equations subtracts the superfluous lovers
deletes the brevity of summer
but the consistency of yearly fluctuations
leaving the simplicity of the answer:
there's no need for trigonometry when algebra will do

he's got no tricks up his sleeve
the warranty will soon expire
and toys only last so long
lovers and bone and breath,
flesh and whispers
to satisfy their boredom
with interactivity

I have faith in blind hope
and the mathematics of men
that Kasparov would admire
and our neighbors are buying earmuffs in anticipation