Monday, August 29, 2016

When You Leave for Someone Younger

When you leave for someone younger
Who will I get
To clean the stove?

To wash the sheets
To darn the socks
To make the checks
To set the rules
To modulate

Who will tell your tallest tales?
Bake your bread
Believe your stories
About what you did
During the day

Who will seal up the trash
And who
Will throw it away?

I’ll come home
And there will be notes
Notes and notes and notes
Explaining where you’ve gone
But where did you go
And with who
And for how long?

When you leave for someone younger
It won’t be sensitive to time

Work will be work
Vacations planned
Graduations
Birthdays, anniversaries
Holidays
That sort of thing

You’ll have made enough food
To last a year
But years are marks in a book
That contains just one page

Your goodbye
Will come in the form
Of an old James Taylor song
And I’ll tap my toe
And know that fleeting feet
Have danced you off

You’ll want things back
You never had

Mattresses sitting
On hardwood floors
With sheets on them
Nobody cares to wash

Stains on stovetops
From fatty foods
And mac and cheese
And bacon grease

Trash that never gets taken out
Stories that never need to be told
Notes on walls
To do this or that
With nothing ever getting done

You’ll find happiness
In misplaced time
While I’m looking for explanations
In the voices of our friends
Who advise I buy a calendar
And circle a day when I’ll be good again

When you leave for someone younger
We will split our memories

You’ll take the bad ones
I’ll hold the good ones
And you’ll move down a road
I can’t even see

I’ll imagine the things
Your new lover can do
That seem so much more
Enticing to you

Trapeze work
Sculpting
Sexual prowess
Beyond my capability

Consideration
Poetry
Listening
Singing
Sincerity

All these years
I thought love
Was supply and demand

Understand your demands
And provide the supplies

I never thought to ask you
If I was right
About what I thought you needed

Maybe because ultimately
We’re all afraid
That the answer to that
Will leave us empty
And empty-handed

Hearing something
And saying—

‘Well, that I do not have’

Did you know all this time
That I was the Wizard
With nothing in my bag
For you?

That you had what you needed all along
And you just needed the right person
To give it to?

And when did you know
That it wouldn’t be me?

That we missed each other
Before we met each other

That if there was ever love between us
It was passed off
Like a penny
Not held together
The way love should be

Like hands over a crevasse
One person falling
The other holding on
Like life depends on it

Like both their lives
Depend on it

When you leave for someone younger
I’ll grow older by myself

I’ll lose you in small pieces
Details turn to wrinkles
Colors fade, but so does hair
Memories and mothballs
Parlor tricks and miracles
The name of a poem
I used to recite…

At night, it will be colder
And I’ll hear the floorboards creak
Dinners will be quieter
If they’re even cooked at all
Summers shorter, winter longer
The music I hear
Will all seem wrong

I’ll be the one left
And never leaving

The one to feel bad for
The one to smile at
The one to check on
The one to comfort
The one who can’t seem
To be fixed

‘That’s what happens’

--They’ll say about me—

‘—When you’re left
For someone younger’

And they’ll lay in warmer beds
With assurances and promises
To keep them safe

Not knowing that outside
Young men and women
Circle their neighborhoods
Sensing ripples
And ready to wave

Ready to upend
Unhappy homes
And end the ups and downs
Of those inside

Ready to show another side of life
Where mattresses don’t belong on beds
And poetry comes pouring from gorgeous young lips
And nobody needs anything
From anyone

No demands
No supplies
No tall tales to tell
No notes and no lies

You’ll be warmer than you’ve ever been
With that younger body lying next to you
Not knowing what comes next
And for once
Not needing to

Friday, August 26, 2016

The Weekend and The Warriors

We’re going to the house on the lake
For the weekend

We’ll be bringing two friends
Who we’ll argue in front of
And drink with
And smoke a little
And try some shit
And belittle a little
And pass out next to
And maybe jerk off
If we think we can stand
The next-day guilt

This is the weekend
We are the warriors

Battleground: Relaxation
Credit extended
Bathing suits that look like fabric swatches
Purchased and photographed
In mauve dressing rooms
All over the city

Pool chairs, photographed
Calm, blue, chlorine waters—
Photographed

Drinks in hand
Drinks never out of hand
Out of hand hijinks by the one
We knew would be good
For a few laughs

A party at the house next door
A party down the road
A party with a cover that would cover
Half our rent

Tan lines and bar lines
And fun straws
And music that grinds on us
When nobody else will

Food?  Who needs food?
We’re not hungry
The heat takes care of that

Whatever room you’ve got left in you
After the alcohol and pills
Gets filled up with resentment
For the Younger Ones

The Younger Ones
Are getting younger
--Have you noticed that?

They look at us
And they
Are not
Impressed

But they don’t have lake houses
And they don’t have pools
They show up on a Thursday
And fuck their way into a weekend rental
But not our weekend rental
At least, not since two weekends ago
When one of the Younger Ones
Wound up on our couch
Dribbling vomit out slowly
Something we didn’t even know was biologically possible

Someone brought one of the Younger Ones home
And we
Said
Nothing

We don’t argue about the things we’re actually upset about
We argue about the pool chairs not being wiped off
And the beds not being made
And the rising cost of the party covers
But we do not
Argue
About
Actual
Things

And by things we mean—

The lack of attention we pay to our significant others
The desire for attention from people other than those aforementioned others
The wrinkles we found yesterday
The extra two pounds that won’t go away
The inability to find a filter that would convincingly place us back in our 20’s
The cruel irony of being able to live better than you’ve ever lived but not at the time when you wish you could have been living it
The guilt we feel when we hop online to announce that ‘We don’t want to be anywhere else’ when we secretly suspect there are other places
Better, brighter, bigger places
That we could be

Spots on the lake aren’t as enviable as they were
When we were the Younger Ones
Before we were the Warriors
And our conquest was the Weekend

After all, once those of us at the lake
Stopped being the Younger Ones
There were other places to be
Over a long weekend

Islands in the Pacific
Coastal towns in Europe
Even hidden metropoli in the Middle East

A spot on the lake?
How quaint
Good for you
Probably all you can handle these days, right?
I mean, you’re not as young as you used to—

Fuck it

We’re getting the plane tickets now
A trip to Spain over a long weekend seems silly
By the time we get there it’ll be Saturday—
Unless we take off work on Friday
Which we can
We can
We can do that
We can leave Thursday
Be in Europe by Friday afternoon
Be drunk by…
Well, we’ll be drunk the whole time
Otherwise what’s the point
We’ll get drunk on the plane
In the airport
In the uber on the way over

We’ll come home Sunday
And be a wreck on Monday
Maybe we’ll call out sick
How are we on vacation time?
Oh right, one of us doesn’t get as much vacation time as the other
Jesus Chris
And when it comes up
It’s always—

You wanted me to get a job

Yes, but I wanted you to get a good job
One with eight weeks vacation time
Like a normal human being
Who isn’t a fucking disaster

Why don’t you go find that kid on the couch
With the puke spilling out onto the carpet
We had to have cleaned
See if he can make you feel relevant again

Fuck you
Fuck you

Plane tickets booked

We’ll be fine by the time we leave
We’ll sit silently back on the way home
Whichever way we’re going home
Sunglasses adjusted
Attitudes deescalated
Depression medicated
Anxiety elevated
Weekend abbreviated
Rage placated
Sexual urges satiated
Spouse berated
Life alleviated

For the time being at least

Next weekend we’ll bring the dogs
The week after that, it’ll be the in-laws
After that, we’ll have that couple with us
That we met in L.A.
Then our rich friends
Then our broke friends
Then our exes
Then our dentists
Then our bosses
Then our girlfriends
Then two guys we meet online
Two hours before catching the train

Live a little, we think
Or live a lot
And survive a little

We have a sinking suspicion
We’re going to die soon

Of course, ‘soon’ may be
Sixty years from now
But it’ll still be too soon
And not soon enough

We sit by the pool
By the lake
And wonder we come to a lake
To swim in a pool

Beyond the lake is an ocean
And beyond the ocean
Is a world
We’re never going to see

Because out in that world
There are unfamiliar parties
And unfamiliar people
We might not want to meet

There are limits to what we can expect
Of ourselves
There are people we have become
Who look nothing like
What we thought of
When we were the Younger Ones

There are weekends we coming up on us
That feel like waves, like tides
When really we’re in an emptying pool
The water going down the drain
Circling slowly, then quickly
Like a drink down the hatch
Like the first thing we needed
And the last thing we needed
And who knows what the fuck
We need anymore

We grin and think we won
We won the race
We won the prize
We won it all

The house, the pool, the lake
The dogs, the dentists, the filtered photos
The sunglasses we’re not sure we could afford
That block out the light and whatever else
Our eyes can’t handle

We feel like we conquered it
The Friday and the fear
The Saturday and the sun
The Sunday and the slim chance
That this can keep going on

We are the Warriors
We are the winners
We are the ones who figured it out

And when the pool is finally empty
We’ll pack up
We’ll head out
We’ll go home

Home

Wherever
That’s supposed

To be