Provisionally "I"
Practically alive
Mistook signs for signified
And so since have often tried
To run them off the cliff like Gadarene swine
And tied my thought-ropes in anchor bends
Wondering whether we were someone better then
Or maybe just better able to pretend
And what better means to our inevitable end
No, I don't know if I know
Though some with certainty insist
"No, certainty exists"
Well, I'm certain enough of this:
In the past fourteen years
There's only one girl I've kissed
In the blistering heat of the Asbury pier
We sat quiet as monks on the Ferris wheel
Until looking down at the waltzer and out at the sea
I asked her "do you ever have that recurring fantasy?"
"Where you push little kids from the tops of the rides?"
She shook her head no I said "oh, neither do I"
And with my grandmother's ring, I went down on one knee
And the subsequent catastrophe, has since, haunted me
Like a fiberglass ghost
In the attic, my inconveniently selective memory
As provisionally "You"
Mercifully withdrew
All the bearing points we thought we knew
Day's run, day's set plot
Our compass shot
We sailed waywardly on
Singing out midnight archer songs
Until well past dawn
It's still dark on the deck of our boats
Haphazardly blown
Broken bows, our aimless arrow-words
Don't mean a thing
So, by now I think it's pretty obvious that there's no God
And there's definitely a God
I dreamt on the rocks at the Asbury dunes
And that you jumped from the top of the Log Flume
And they gather like wolves on the boardwalk below
And they're howling for answers no wolf can know
I charged at the waves with a glass in my hand
And was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand
And landed beside your remains on the stones
Where your cold fingers wrapped round my ankle bone
While maybe ten feet away was a star
Thousands of times the size of our sun
Exploding like tiny balloons
You'd throw darts at
I slept until our chest was full
Of yarn we spun from Shetland wool
In socks from where the Dorset grows
Sheared and scoured hours
Before the rooster crows
The price of German silver fell
Threw disused thalers down
The superstition well
