Come Look into my Kinetoscope & Nothing, Nothing Will Keep Us Together
Come Look into my Kinetoscope
As we pick through the charred rubble
of language, I’ll find you something
romantic, like the kind of streetlamps
they stopped making once Hollywood
started shooting its movies in color. I’ll say
thank you for knowing my love language
is fucking. I want to learn about so many
types of new insects. I’ll whisper to you,
asking if you can imagine being in love
on the Titanic & you will say yes, you can.
Cinema spoke & made it so. I give up—
just take me to the ocean. Maybe that
can be our new religion, though I know
that it gets cold out there on the water
& it feels like I have so much to do
before we leave. I need to call my mom
& tell her that I love her. I need to dub
over old Black Sabbath cassettes
with recordings of me reading sonnets
& place them gently in the cup holders
of each of my friends' cluttered cars.
Nothing, Nothing Will Keep Us Together
Bowie's “Heroes,” Robert Fripp recorded
three takes of his guitar line & it was only after
Tony Visconti decided, on a whim, to play
all three of the guitar tracks simultaneously
that they realized what the song wanted to be.
I think about how much of our lives we might
refer to as happy accidents, how no one really
has a plan. To be honest, I'm not interested
in a house. I’m not interested in the physical
structure of a house. I'm only interested
in the linguistic representation of a house
& the ways we choose talk around it.
But we don’t talk about houses. We both live
in apartments & no one can afford a plot
of land without selling smoke & prayer. I will
knife open my chest to hand you my heart,
but I won’t lose any blood. That was never
what was at stake. You once told me that
everyone is more beautiful in the winter,
but I can't prove this. I can only retell it
in my designated role as stenotype machine.
There is nothing left to write about, so
I will devote myself with religious fervor
to the art of cliché. I’ll learn my techniques
from the greeting card makers, write sappy
poems for everyone I know & scatter them
about like gospel tracts, hope some of them
grow into oak trees that last generations.
I'm tired of describing everything as liminal.
I would like for something to be written
on the return label, for the sidewalk to dry,
for our song to be pressed into vinyl forever.
Let’s stay focused & make do with what
we have, even if we step off the plane with
nothing but a guitar. For example: on David
