2007-04-18
Love & Malfunction
Darling, tonight over poached eggs
Let’s discuss our failures
I will opine about my unsuccessful foray
Into the restaurant business
You can empty your pockets of expired vitamins,
The receipts of another era
Things bought & broken,
Things lost and listless,
The paper in your pockets
Growing scathed and crumpled.
Until you rustle like leaves
When you stand up to head to the men’s room.
Have a glass of wine with your egg,
Stare into the hazy future which holds,
No doubt, more failures and abandoned projects,
More unscrubbed thesis statements,
Several ambitions gone soft,
That radio program we always spoke of hosting,
The ice cream delivery service,
The midnight deli we wanted to start.
The museum of broken bicycles,
The guitar pedal modification corporation,
The tea importing business.
Or, for that matter, our planned documentary
Of the manufacturing history of New England.
Soon, and hopefully on a porch,
we will look back and can hardly recognize
that version of ourselves that broke the credenza
then left graduate school to wait tables.
That person who once wanted to be a math teacher,
The crafty girl who made & sold friendship bracelets
In the 8th grade. We will speculate on what might
Have been our lives, were they not, like all things,
Muddled by love & malfunction.