Provisionally I, practically alive
Mistook signs for signified
And so since I've often tried
To run them off a cliff like Gadarene swine
And tied my word-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 14 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 ride?
And she shook her head: No
I said: Oh, neither do I
And with my grandma'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, days set plot
Our compass shot
We sailed waywardly on
Singing our midnight archer songs
Until well past dawn
It's still dark in the deck of our boat
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 of 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
I was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand
And I landed beside your remains on the stones
Where your cold fingers wrapped 'round my ankle bones
Maybe ten feet away was a star
Thousands of times the size of our Sun
Exploding like the tiny balloons
That 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 this disused thalers down the superstition well
