Why do couples always appear tired together at parties?
Was the process of finding each other so exhausting
that they now need to take a long rest?
Or are they worn out from the effort of pretending
to be interested in anything other than each other?
Being charming with strangers seems quite pointless
at this point. It is draining maintaining
this front: She’s hardly there at all.
She sits on his lap, yawning.
She feels sorry for you
because you can’t have her,
and she distrusts you
because your hungers are unaccounted for;
while he seems distant but content,
happy with his choice.
Holding her hand signifies his priority,
and it will remain held as they drive home,
their reserves finally unflowing,
giving voice to sympathy
for those unfortunates
who do not have
what they have.
Couples At Parties
Holding Pattern
She demanded to be held.
So I held her.
She collapsed lifelessly into my arms
and remained there
while I lay there, with mind elsewhere,
wondering how much longer
I was supposed to hold her for.
After what seemed like a long time,
I gently disengaged myself
and got out of the bed.
She looked coldly up at me from the pillow.
She said that she would find somebody else:
Somebody who would want to hold her
for two hours
after an act of love
that lasted two minutes.
Iron Anniversary
The object of this restlessness that puzzles you
is solitude: a loneliness for loneliness,
a wistfulness for restlessness, a straining back
to what comes naturally – the way things used to be
when I had only me. I miss myself madly.
I long to be romantically involved
with myself again, like old times,
dependent only upon independence, demanding
only temptation. I’m better off in an empty kennel,
unmuzzled and free: that was the essence
of my doghouse epiphany.
Upon your encroachment my world shrinks.
My energy level sinks. I feel as if I’m fading away.
But your need of me is addictive: It keeps me warm,
the way a tea cozy maintains the pot’s warmth
long after the tea has lost its flavor.
Now I am continually both parched and sated,
sapped, tired of feeling, halfheartedly clinging.
With or without you, my life has no meaning.
Say You Love Me
“I love you,” she says,
and my heart sinks.
Knowing what is required of me,
I attempt to reciprocate.
But it’s a struggle,
the words won’t take shape.
No other phrase is so hard to articulate;
no other sentiment is voiced so apprehensively.
I could be honest and say: I love you
but almost everything about you annoys me…
But somehow
those three precious, perilous syllables
are squeezed out, squeamishly:
“Isle… of you.”
It never sounds right when I say it,
but I say it
to put her at ease,
because what you get out of it,
temporarily,
is peace.
The One
I am the one
waiting for the One.
I have never entered a room
without hoping that the One
I am waiting for
might be found there.
Despite decades of disappointment,
I still look for her in every face,
looking for somebody to become that place
where everything that falls apart
falls into place.
But if I found her, I wouldn’t want her,
for as long as the possibility
of somebody else wanting me exists,
I will always want somebody else.
And I realize now that if she ever does arrive
it will not be in the prime of either of our lives,
at a cocktail party with a drink in her hand,
but that she is more likely to arrive holding a bedpan
as I am breathing my last in a hospital bed.
Only then, with restlessness and hope extinguished,
and all other options exhausted,
will I finally be ready
for the One.
Gravy In The Rain
Italian broadcast from Radio Kaos featuring unknown interpreter “reading and stumbling over selections” of Inertia and Antiepithalamia.
WINDSONG
I have a heart like a wheelbarrow,
there are no windmills in my mind.
Love blows in and floats around freely
like the wind – getting in the way
of other things.
This rootless love without design,
which has no object, point or point of origin –
one looks for it in every face,
looking for somebody to become that place
where everything that falls apart
falls into place.
It seeks definition, a place of rest,
to find its home in a woman’s breast –
to die there, or multiply there.
When, surely, to keep it to oneself
would be best.
Suck Sorrow
Yes, my dear, we have each other:
that’s what worries me.
I wouldn’t focus on your flaws
if you did not call yourself mine;
you are the living embodiment of my failure,
another symptom of my decline.
But, darling, please don’t let our love ever die.
Because if it does, I’ll be shattered
by all the time I’ve wasted
keeping it alive.
DEFERVESCENCE
I stared at you with lust, pity and loathing,
otherwise known as love:
projecting my fantasies on to your realities,
in the hope of spoiling
this hazy embodiment of desire
with pointless needs.
Another incarnation of immateriality
that becomes a necessity:
demanding some sort of release.
Drain in Vain
An acute sensation of falling
for and into a black hole:
a soft focus abyss, otherwise known as bliss.
Or a train wreck, carrying hazardous waste,
something I can look forward to
looking back on with distaste.
Constantly fighting funny familiar feelings of futility,
trying to put the brakes on the morbidity,
but it keeps rolling down the line.
And as I watch it disappear,
life as I have long known it,
becomes all the more precious
and acutely defined.
John Tottenham 