On relationships

On relationships

I can’t keep getting buzzed on a Tuesday night because then

I can’t stop writing on a Wednesday morning.

Sometimes I wonder what it is about love that keeps me coming back for more.

All the physical stuff is great of course but

it’s never enough or it’s not quite right or

there’s some other sort of hesitation that drives us to opposite sides of

the emotional playing field called “us.”

I think if we don’t work, it’s OK.  Well, not really but it’s not just us.

Nobody really works when you look closely enough:

take away the hopes, aspirations, kissing, smoke, mirrors, kids, sex and afterglow –

in the end it’s just about folks wiping their ends with a Kleenex and wondering

why they went there again, their

hearts and brains elsewhere without forwarding addresses…

it doesn’t even have the requisite intent to qualify as a displacement fantasy.

I know this isn’t the expected answer to a request for a happy love poem –

a feel good, hands clutched, entwined fingers under the table actually

resting in your lap, gathering heat, steam, a rub, a hint of a later assignation

that most times goes nowhere.

I used to think it was me

that it was me who’s fucked up: I blamed the divorce - the vivisector par excellence

of feeling, giving, expressing, receiving love, like, touch ANYTHING

from someone else but discovered

it’s NOT me, it’s us damnit. 

And that insight was not as liberating as you would think.

I’m honest. I say it. 

It’s us.

I want “it” whatever “it” is but it seems I’m lost in a place I can’t find my way out of

that makes me seek alternatives,

even wish for vacations – alone – or the end of them and a speedy return to work

where at least there are performance parameters beyond which no one expects

or gives a crap if you do: big whup.

That sounds cruel but that’s not so. This way nobody gets hurt.

I wonder can you be this needy yet intact?

“Please don’t make me drink the Kool Aid."