i'd like to eat champagne
and the o's in philosophy
wave with the glove of
the hand on my watch

i'd like to name my band pot
and make shirts that say
'i sing for pot', have people
look oddly at the sidewalk

i'd like to sketch acid free
and have drawings preserve
themselves, like acid free jelly
on stiff sheets of white toast

i'd like to decapitalize every
sentence on earth and
ruin the structure
of
ev'ry
poem.

but instead i lay deafeningly
on the pattern of your
shirt; have
headaches and red narrowed eyes

--when the contacts won't stick
(and everything is pounding but the music)

a hand on my shift as we shift like mountains
amiably grating against one another
leaving boulders in our wake,
dead bodies in the driveway

tell myself that
we'd still like, together
(to do everything we promised)

even if we...half-accomplish it,
end up changing nothing
but ourselves

i'd like to lie to make things better
(but not now, not here)
because my head is pounding.

no way to tell (if my)
illusions of inadequacy (are only)

you.

7-30-04