I live in the subjunctive, a world of if, perhaps, and could have been. I know the name that names my pain, have chained a line straight to it into sorrow’s very heart. What is chained to yours? Hint: the last face you see will not be mine.
I confused self-exposure with self-expression, tousled hair with longing, parlor games for come-ons. Boy, girl. I was a guest on a talk show that nobody watched, and once made the evening news. That was me in the background wearing the embarrassing t-shirt.
You are in Paris, Marrakesh, Bali. You are singing pop songs in Serbian, writing poems to painters, drinking wine along the Seine. I am earning wisdom by mail, one mistake at a time. Power tools, holes in the wall, gin straight from the bottle.
Once I painted a wall where paintings were to be hung, large canvases in blues and greens, reds and grays. They were all about relationship, the painter said. Later I tore down that wall with a hammer and pry bar. It was all about recidivism.
Drunk, I call your lover but can’t stop laughing when he objects to my tone. You are far across that lonesome ocean. I am green and you are grown up. What color does that make you?
Yesterday I spent an hour trying to tape your voice messages to me. “Move the blue one next to the green one,” the painter said. The blue one; the green one: I love the way artists talk.