-- for Mark
at first it seemed we were always
dancing and falling
then only falling or you did the
falling and I did the dancing
years of Mexican beer expensive magazines antibiotics holy cards mescal chartreuse overdue library books homemade soup gin French wine new tennis shoes nightmares black and white movies a small fortune in coffee and cigarettes African bracelets records lost cats dope anti-depressants black panties postcards from Europe bad scotch cool t-shirts flowers from Safeway skinny braids grown and cut off lost earrings beds unmade paintings unpainted writing unwritten cockroaches blaming and drinking and fucking and talking and dancing and falling
tattoos that mean absolutely nothing to our new lovers
scars
you got me pregnant and runny as brie
she tickled in my belly during 8 1/2 and afterward
we drank coffee at a sidewalk cafe and walked home young and cold and
careless our breath coming out like dreams
i came to you so hard that night
she came on so hard and huge i only wanted
drugs and when they cut her out you gazed in rapture at my
insides and could have slipped your hand in me and touched
my liver my kidneys my spleen my heart (O Baudelaire!)
and how you came home to find her sleeping on my tit
t.v. blaring bluely in the night or my ass in the air and you
big daddy-o buzzed and smelling of food. did you walk
by the river for hours then before you came home?
when did i begin to wake feeling i was drowning when
did my bones begin to dream of the desert and a highway leading
infinite to the horizon? when did you start to drive so fast?
the years of laundromats of paychecks of broken-down cars your
grassy muscled thighs your body pulling me hard against you
your splendid bullish head your eyes the smell and taste of you. our life.
the years of falling
will i tell our lovechild the fatal star x'd lovers Byron version of
melancholic opium expatriation and ruin imported beer psycopath
fantasies killing dreams and nights so dark you couldn't find your
soul or shall i tell her the truth that after a while
we couldn't even see each other?
that if we had been animals we might have mated for a season in some sheltered
shady place king and queen of beasts and she our
happy clambering cub
(or how you must have seen it in my eyes)
and about how the rest came after and now we sleep in
different houses different beds no beds and how
i wish you well and whole no movie actor dying
on the highway
she sits at the sunny morning table eating
cheerios while I smoke myself awake and i am
thinking of those hard-lived and gone days of
dancing and falling
