Elusion

Poster child—
Communist turned saint
Comedian of terrors
Valedictorian from yesterday 

Prostrate at the crossroads of convention 
I drown in changes of the season
Losing my peripheral cognition 
But you were made to wade in 
Hazelnuts and burnt-out cigarettes 
Flower girl learns to bear a diamond ring

Through these six months I’ve weathered 
An infinitude of reasons—
Prescriptions urging me to stay

Yet your time is imprecise

Amongst placebo-like excursions,
Cotton candy faces and vindictive ferris wheels
The world burns with incandescence
The actors of the universe thrust battered clockwork into place 

My senses occupy a perfumed haze 

A discarded periscope washes up
Beneath these blue and yellow striped umbrellas
I permit the oceanview to discompose my female gaze
These pebbles are in fragments 
The sand is muddied on the shore 
There are snow-white seagulls overhead 

We talk past one another without converging into one 

Lying crippled on the bathroom floor 
Beating fists against these tiled walls
I am doomed to live eternally through ordinary proceedings: 
Conversations of the weather 
A rundown of tomorrow’s day 
Visiting the old accountant 
Phone call made in passing 
Plea to keep on rolling 
Rolling like it never happened 
Watching him with starlit eyes 
Desire coalescing 
Just to prove an incorporeal point 

These dreams—
They culminate in hot spells in the middle of the night 
Bilious inferno deep inside your chest 

Mournfulness displaced 
Temper resolute 
Ashamed 

In another vision I have willed myself to sit inside a cab 
Excruciating talk of San Francisco
New York City
If these buildings could collapse on one another 
We would see a graveyard of this pantomime called hesitation
Nauseating operatic cultivation 
Caterwauling civilization; 
Left to roam amongst the ruins, 
I would collapse into your arms;
There would be no more planes 
These every several months that land in New York City 
You would stand before me for a fraction of a second 
(Until we would regress into society) 
Delirious

Was it all from one mistake?
The man who’d never known a thing of chivalry or manners 
Stood beneath these Doric columns 
Handcuffed onto epitaphs of torture 
Might he not have apprehended streetlamps 
Glowing dim alongside human pavements?
Waved to lovers sprawled over wooden benches
Swallowed up in an embrace?
Spilled a puzzle of a thousand jigsaw pieces 
On a parquet floor?
Heralded the muses of belonging—

Might he not have understood? 

Or was it a misalignment of our values? 

Having weathered all the wars, 
You burn another cigarette that smokes up all the halls 
And I am free to peer throughout this smoky daze 
After all the bloodshed and the skirmishes
You could have dared not to come back!

Was it duty that prompted me to burn it all apart—
Leaving him to stand befuddled on the corner of the subway stop? 

Or was I simply too uptight to take the subway?