Wednesday, March 31, 2010

I'll Wait For You

[This is a reworking and frankensteining of an older love poem. Pretty standard cheesy fun. It's basically two poems smooshed together. Hope y'all enjoy.]

You may not know this, but your eyes are big.
Bigger than average. Bigger than your head.
Bigger than the sun. Bigger than a Centaur’s appetite.
They are big and sticky. Evergreen sap sticky.
I can’t get unstuck. Your eyes are big brown balls of sticky.

And when you laugh, it’s an earthquake.
I lose my balance. I lose my breath.
When I am around you, I make damn sure
I’ve got my inhaler. Ventolin keeps me alive.

And you love things I’ve never thought about.
Like pine nuts and things made from soy.
And dishes with names I can’t pronounce.
You make me think tofu is tastes decent.
Better than decent. Good. Tim’s Cascade JalapeƱo Chip good.
This is not normal. Your dimples are bear traps.
I could try to gnaw my legs off,
but I’d rather not.

When you’re away my head isn’t settled.
It wanders through fiction. Imagines a life in Shire.
In Narnia. On the moon. With you. And as long as blood
pumps through my brain. As long as these wrinkly lumps
behind my forehead still project images. As long as
your eyes are imprinted in the neurons and synapses
and other scientific big words for fancy parts of my brain,

I’ll wait for you.

Alone, on my couch with two blankets.
I’ll wait until the sea turns to Tabasco
and the mountains turn to hash-browns.
I’ll be your breakfast sausage if you be my eggs.

I’ll wait until the stars turn into wombats,
group themselves in fours and sing barbershop.
In that sorrowful gloom, in those harmonies

I'll wait for you.

Until the Book of Common Prayer is rewritten
to include the hokey pokey, until sweatpants
become formal wear, until my stomach learns to speak to whales;

I’ll wait for you
as long as the sun holds a grudge against Pluto.

I’ll wait for you
as long as people on Uranus
giggle when they say Mercury.

If I ever see you coming in the distance
I’ll take my dragon wings and pizza rolls
out of the freezer, let them thaw,
sit myself down in front of the TV
and put on some cartoons.

I would like to eat pizza rolls and watch the Simpsons,
with you, until they cease to be funny,
until Krusty the Clown telling John Updike to shut up
stops making me chuckle,
until Lenny and Carl go their separate ways.

Which is to say:
I would like to eat pizza rolls and watch the Simpsons
with you
forever.

1 comment:

graham said...

this is one you should time and make a slam-edit of, I think.