after John Ashbery
See, our lips bend:
we are always moving warmthward (if I may)
through and beyond what we forgot we would say:
I’m so about being buried together.
Your nightmares are of us being unkind to each other.
Yesterday, on our first day off in months, you cried ‘cause
a scientist at a global convention declared that
we only have a few decades left of living like this.
I’m so fucking glad we got sober when we did.
Kiss me before I mention landfills, my adolescent love affair
with the god-glare on the Mayan calendar,
my adult one with clapping on the 1 and the 3.
Kiss me because more people have been to Berlin than I have,
in the shower when the water temp makes our bodies hum—
let me see you without distance between us, let me
see you seeing me as amazing. O the steam!
If it all ends soon, it’ll be slow and sorrowful
but I know now that I will dance towards someone
while my mind can still reach for magic.