You Can Find Poetry in Any Place at Any Time (Evening at Work)

The Author Makes a Change

Listen, she set herself aside.
In junior high
in 1987 
we called it dialing out,
and any excuse she offers is as invalid
as a wet bomb
or a pre-made mojito.
We do not live
in some suburban malaise movie
set decorated within a clipped breath of post-ironic kitsch
yet she choose,
she opted
to leave our split level mid century ranch house
and not take her clothes,
not even her wallet and snearkers,
forgetting to feed Wiley and Peekaboo
despite my notes
and knowing I wouldn’t be home
for several uninformed days.
To abdicate
renounces all intent
without regret,
and this isn’t confession
neat and tidy with a kindly pervert
resolution with a few Hail Marys,
especially after she demonstrated
no faith
in herself, me, or us.
Really, how do I forgive that?
Have I the power
to absolve
all that she’s blithely,
quickly dissolved
like skin in lye.
I will not implicate myself
or my small breasts,
my other insecurities
she tossed as easily
as me into the pool
at every backyard party
we ever hosted between May and September.
Now I am December.
Asleep in healing, in wait,
my anger preserved under the snow
and her stuff out back in the pit
ablaze.

The Author Celebrates

The Author Misses the Road

Proposition #99.5

“What are you talking about? I gave you the key yesterday morning before you left.” She stuffed her hands in her warm peacoat’s cavernous pockets, though her legs were exposed, her feet in pink ballet shoes. He searched his pockets, jacket and pants, noting only his car, home and work keys, plus two receipts.

“No, you didn’t. I responded twice yesterday each time you texted me about it while I….” He disliked texting. She liked convenience.

“Yeah right, this is stupid,” she said, pivoting away. He stood, pretending steady.

“Don’t divert. You did not give me the key.” He wished she had. She knew she had not.

“Well I thought I did and now mine’s upstairs and we’re stuck out here on the sidewalk.” She regretted that last part, for selfish reasons. He wondered why she would decide to give him another new key.

He added, “Stuck in forty two degree cold.”

She fumed, “It can’t just be cold with you, can it? It has to be forty fucking two degrees!”

His father was a well-funded, widely-published research oncologist. Hers was a lead interior painter for a local home building contractor. He once

You said: She wanted his sex/ But found herself vampire sad/ Veins of empty lust

In reply to this post.

He Is Not His Work

When I say elaborate
it elicits from her
not so slight dismay
or panic,
discernment depending,
its hard syllables
insisting fulfillment
and like a shove off the curb
causing reaction
or revelation,
ready, or not.

Others might suggest
shouting emboldens the angry.
She is quite loud.
But danger is a liar’s demise.
Philosophy finds a home
in a silent room
where unthinking lovers
use apps and pretend
new friends are baking cakes.

See how that works?

Suggest it, anew.
That angle you thought could not
fill you, thoroughly.

Puerto Rican man with mocha beauty blessed
but he conjures in me my mother’s mad Germanic distance,
undefinable beyond its aloof chill
and how that shoves my back against a wall 
made of old emotions long thought left behind,
despite the folly of fantasy I do not want
tangibility at the detriment of romance,
and desperately I desire a moment’s passion
to burn me down to dust even my dentist cannot identify
but then who can promise such a proposition
will not go up with the smoke
and what chance would I have to survive
combustion like that, like the sun apoplectic
but if I were to give in and go to it
ignoring the blisters boiling across my skin
and leap into his arms, damning all distress
well I would not be the first or the last.

© 2013 Original Content Required

Proposition #78