As the Evening Wore On
Impressed? Say it might be so.
And you were the only indefatigable, delicate miracle
leaning against a telephone booth on Broadway
that last curious night
when it was curtains for button-crazed seamstresses
holed-up in the kept holiness of cold-water flats.
Spiffed,
as they used to say,
caught warm-footed and a real looker too,
back before we even knew each other’s last names.
Business cards and uncanny hairdos be damned.
Selfish and unrealistic’s
probably not the best combination
in a pinch’s instinctual punch.
Incomparable too,
without even a strut or a slice of sole
to forget the roomy luxury of a Sunday by.
Beside somebody else besides yourself,
you know,
the trial and error of getting by.
Jaw-dropping, this
inclination
that bows in late, hatless,
hefts a teetering load of begged mercy,
and, certain as a eulogy’s passing,
plays nice with the strings.
And so, a phlebotomist’s pursuit of veiny insurrection
carries all the dope-sick girls on high beams
to other carriers of esteem —
torpedo that request,
please. Pleased, you see,
to keep this nose cleaner than the surroundings
until we dive like knuckled sieves
wrenched through the business section,
burnt in casual grates,
parsed to interchangeable clippings,
and bought over and over until nothing
sells.
Veto my crashed passion
(which lasts about as long as a ripe avocado would)
hiding under coffee tables
through the shyest vindications
of just who’d do the talking to and/or for.
Justified with the erratic purpose of a muted phone call —
enough to stun any onlooker from her window seat — we
can garble to great heights through the jammed frequencies
that hold us for keeps in the stalled traffic of conceptual
(or perpetual, perhaps)
drafts: what you and I,
in the shelled fragments of our days,
never quite seem
to get around to being.
Just later and later
it gets,
before the moon softly haggles its duct-taped way
earlier and earlier
into and out of
the lowest ups
down to and in
the passing time of what I
for now
get the short and unbelievable chance
to call my life.
