What

What I like about you, honey, is your curvy, mezzaluna grace

way of telling lies like there was a turpentine for
everything you paint

and a world washes this way and that, it runs, as you change
your mind

to argue you never did or you never were, all witnesses just
sonic furor

against the truth of right this minute, three gin & tonics
into Thursday night

with a hopeless but happy man who believes you. The trick of
pinball,

the winner that stands there the longest just banging the
table, wringing

all the bells and lights out of the system, the havoc over
in the corner

that was so quiet all day, all week, until you get in there
and lose

while hammering out a creation kind of racket so points
don’t truly matter.

There’s a line of men and women angry at you, bean counters
in this life

who have never seen a smile like that, and they skip over
it, because value

is a committee thing, and there’s all the big noise about
homewrecking

and betrayal, while your smile rolls out a dimension that’s
gone so fast,

it sucked things away with it, then a new smile unfolds
from somewhere else,

some other universe, the way physicists dream their muses
then forget.

I’m woozy, and I know I can’t escape it. But I come from way
over there,

so I’m riding your next big bang grin home to all my old
convictions.

One more cocktail, though, and the elation factory closes
down.

You’re gone to tell a cowboy what his Wranglers do to
eyeballs,

your company collapsed to crushed cigarettes rimmed red as a
bankside curb,

while I can’t figure another way to travel through space and
faith and time.

Ha! Weary, drunk nation...as if wormholes emit mysterious rays
of language.