says the man who doesn’t remind me of you
except that everything reminds me of you, except mausoleums.
In the important world (my imagination), I am watching you, simply, without hope or
dream. In the unimportant world, this man and I are driving past the cemetery.
The mausoleums are impressive, ornate. They seem meant to crumble, suddenly and
violently, like the class system, but they have not, and it has not. The angels that guard
them are elegant, Edwardian,
hard, cold and unemotional. Their expressions won’t change
except to be wiped away, very gently, by time. They are what I now want to be. They
never utter the sentence I utter most frequently:
“I do but I don’t.”
There’s nothing good about ill-timed death. Nor about the death of love. That poetry
glamourizes them disturbs me. I don’t want to be lying in that cemetery. I don’t want to
be sitting in the cemetery
on a stone bench, thinking about others. I don’t want to be sitting in this car, on a bucket
seat of hot plush,
with the man who gets excited by mausoleums.
There’s no fooling the sweet dumb pulse.
Your heart chalks a chair, I sit down.
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