Post-Lullaby

[My soft, sensual,
affectionate,
and unfeeling post-lullaby]




A toast
to the day I fell in love:
to that day the District of Columbia
was finally overwritten.
On that day
I looked through the photography of Martin Schoeller
against a clean slate wall, euphoric.

I sat down on the bench and placed you beside me around the corners of old columnal artwork,
and I said without a word,
"This is it.
This is the one."


What I meant...
How childishly, desperately in that moment and aloud to every moment undeveloped:
Mark my words. This will be the one.
If this dies, I have died.
For this has defeated all other.


Once, a man wished to become a horse.
He was granted that wish.
But in his last moments before he transformed, regret hit him inexorably.
He tried to remember all the things he loved about being human.
And then, in a four-legged instant, it disappeared. He wondered with what remaining brainpower he had
what that strange bipedal creature called 'human' was.








The times when you inhale through a tube

were it that your final 24 hours were condensed into that breath
holding in, failing, and grasping for it all

until you let go and the clock unwinds itself back to the present
and my apocalyptic fuel recedes.