Tears for Fears

Funny how June is situated in the midst of February like this
since yesterday all I remember is a fight in the snow
beneath a winter’s moon
And today the summer sun squints
over the grandeur of this
dry plane,
the world ironed flat
receeding,
voices silenced.

“That was months ago,”
she says.
“You have a way of elapsing time,”
she says.
What about the TV going out? That was yesterday
wasn’t it?
“Yes. That was yesterday.”
The only voice now
in a sea of powerful voices from which
this house is now cut off
The voices that coordinate
everything
into a centralized and hollow viewpoint
cannot come in here
unless I get the mail.

Headline.
Rolling Stone.
“Adam Lambert is gay,”
she says, and I ask
“who is Adam Lambert?”
and they say “He is Gay.”
Ok.
He is our American Idol.
Our love for our own sex
Projected back against us,
Cowering, Father Britain telling us it’s ok
And our soul conceding in the form
Of Randy Jackson.

Sometimes I confuse the word Scatological
because it sounds like scattered
only smarter
but really means
like,
wiping shit over everything.
Is this telling?
How about that I wipe my ass with paper?
"Hefner's daddy sold Bibles.""And mine gave it all away.""What's that supposed to mean?""Whatever you think it means."

I’ll write the words
You are free to stop reading them.
Bats chase tiny bugs in the lingering warmth of day.

Our freedom is interlaced with
the responsibility to inhabit our choices,
those of those
around us
and make them our own.

When Rome fell, the barbarians found Caesar
and his buddies out gambling.
Because that
is what the powerful
must
do.

“Let’s play a game like jeopardy,”
she says
“where we give only answers
like foregone conclusions
and all our questions go unasked.”
I’ll start. He didn’t kiss me.
Today.”
And all the questions well up in me
radiant, jealous, dynamic,
like life on this planet
on TV, in digital color,
or
effervescent joy while the music is playing
and I am too tired to play.

Sleep on a rocky bed
alone with my visions and dreams
My head, a monkey
until I sleep against a warm body
and share in a few of the more carnal
variety
Like the moon, sleeping against the earth.
The moon is not a mother but we all know she could be
so we feel sympathy for her.
Pale and aging,
Reading her starry-eyed romance novels
And knitting the daily tide.

The earth is the mother of all life
And so we hate her, or at least I do.
Yesterday the moon was over the city
following you around every corner
and today—
“That was last November
she says,
crowned by a Galileoan congery of innumerable stars
a road leading to milk
I lay my head beside her
And nuzzle
Today the moon is full to bursting
I say.
And after I take a shit
and look at myself in the mirror
we can look at her and cry.

Ok,
She says
crying
For it is already tomorrow.