I felt like a roller coaster had ridden me
Like every theorem I thought I had proved was shown to be false
Like a swarm of tadpoles had free-climbed my anus, fought their way past my intestines into my stomach,
and there, grown into frogs, frogs whose ribit rhythms were completely incompatible with any rhythms of my own
Then the inevitable happened, as it often does
The pretzel-tongued fragments burst into applause
while all around me a voice kept repeating
You comma you comma you
Afterwards, we pizza-walked across the twice-filtered boulevard,
wondering if we would ever recapture that unconquerable sense of snapdragon futility
These lines, those lines, their lines, clothes lines
all may meet at infinity, but with a shudder,
fearing what will happen if they not only meet,
but embrace
My passion-drained eyes welled up,
not with tears,
not even with blood,
but with something far worse:
the auburn-scented memories of our last phlegmatic decade together
We made plans,
hopeful plans, radiant plans, insegrevious plans,
all the while knowing that
“Life is what happens while you’re making plans…”
(John 3:14:159)
So, when everything happened exactly as we had planned,
we cowered, knowing that something else was supposed to have happened,
and the not knowing what didn’t
painted our success a piranhic plaid
Still, we marched on
left, right, right, left, left, right, right, left
believing that, however doughy the future might be,
we could mold it into a metaphor-shaped life
that would exist without a referent
Happily Ever After
