red says

Red says I'm a little orthodox
which I can't disprove on Wednesdays
when I pay my weekly one-dollar worship
to the world's worst cone of yogurt.
It drips on our copies of Homage to Catalonia,
and by the way, we fetishize other fights
in lieu of the ones we couldn't get to or create,
for different reasons, of course.

But wait: Today Red said
something profound about Starbucks,
though I had to goad her into it
(she's yet to recognize patience
as my most irritating advantage),
but it's fine. States will come to recognize
each other's governments,

though Red won't have much of one,
and I still don't get the men thing,
and she's still oblivious to
my Midwest quest for solitude.
But it's fine! Wait, Odd-Couple syndrome:
Turns out "up your alley"
isn't what you think it means.

Chapter Two: Tomorrow, Red files
lagoons of wit-bedizened copy
while I motor around looking for totalitarians
and other young American disasters,
and I'm sure all of us will get famous
if we don't get everything horribly wrong
or attempt small careers in hip-hop,

and if we ever lie or play it wrong
put that on the list of things
I'm gonna land on like a Steinway

in the later years,
when Red says
we'll burn down the hurt
and wash the ashes together for love,
though I still think
love goes it alone.

reminder

It's somewhere in Mayabeque, outside Havana,
mounted on the endless roadside:
THE LAND THAT PRODUCES NOTHING
PRODUCES ONLY SADNESS.
This land, those signs, begging work
for the eternal revolution.
No work, no food. No food, no life. So work.

A month later, at my local pizza joint,
they work. Just a bland block of capitalism
hunched on the corner across from
the brick inexistence of a was-been gas station.
It hangs urgently over one of the ovens:
CHECK FOR BUBBLES! THAT'S WHY
WE HAVE A BUBBLE FORK!

No reminders say REMEMBER LOVE
or LIFE IS SO GOOD because
the love has always been natural
and the movies too on some afternoon
when you shouldn't have gone,

and when sadness descends
my cut of mind never needs
instruction on each of
the all of each
word,

just bubbles,
bubbles and the beggings of life.

late january, outside a cafe

The conversation failed, fell open
and awoke a long silence.
They stared soft at each other. (No snow.)
Each on some island of private dissent.
He thought of work and terrible failure,
she of her work too and the wait
for him to show terrible weakness.

Weakness would be more interesting in a man:
a giant plaster figurine held aright
by the prettiest needles of glass.