On the Stones of the Temple Floors Incantations are Written
There comes a time
when most people start walking back,
walking back to wherever it is they came from,
trying to find the place where they were known.
No one speaks of poetry or money or of left turns in front of trucks or the judgments of the courts or your second divorce, they speak of how shy you were when you were nine, or how the grade one teacher lived to be one-hundred and about the record-setting heat of the seventeenth of September and it is like walking towards the east and into the rising sun - just like walking into the old and empty cathedrals of Europe and being the first to arrive and it smells like a long time and the air tastes like many centuries but it is empty, no one is there, and pray for her, pray for her if you pray, and pray for me too,
pray for me. Sweet love, these murmurs say,
I have done no harm.
My Next Ex-Girlfriend is Really Good Looking
I told my parents, before I’d introduced her to them,
that my next ex-girlfriend was really good-looking.
Pre-Covid we’d sit on the deck and have a glass and
she’d smoke Purple Kush and
we’d look up and count meteors and
satellites and
the sisters in the Pleiades and
look for anything interesting.
When the International Space Sation goes over it’s quite a sight.
Those days are gone.
I miss the nights, not the person.
I did not see any UFOs.
She was a believer, but in and of itself that's nothing,
I know tons of people who believe, like
the guys that I work with, and the one doesn't even believe in wind chill.
He does believe in ghosts.
His wife says that one night he sat up in bed and talked steadily but incoherently for ten minutes and she couldn't wake him up.
It scared her.
Finally, he lay back down and she was able to wake him up.
He told her he'd talked to his dead mother the whole time,
he'd woken up and there she was.
He had tears in eyes when his wife told me the story.
My next ex-girlfriend
is going to be really good looking,
and it would be nice if she lived somewhere warm,
but if there’s rough water on the coast
of that tranquil place,
we’ll be ok to spend the day alone and
the light will last us like the light on midsummer’s eve,
past the anger of that passing storm, and
when I tell the story of that day,
I’ll speak about speaking about ghosts.
Go Ahead and Ask Me
People ask what happened.
I tell them she’s in the women’s prison,
in Banning, California,
or that she married a wealthy doctor.
I say that she dresses well these days, and she’s active
in Republican fund-raising circles.
I tell them that she got back together
with her high-school boyfriend,
and that just last week she asked
to borrow three-hundred dollars.
She said it was for cocaine, for him.
She’d pay me back when she could.
I tell them that I have not seen her for years,
but her son still calls me and he’s doing alright.
He never speaks of her.
I tell them that I saw she’d been promoted.
She’s one rung below the C-Suite now.
She seems to be doing well.
I tell them I heard she’d found, and lost, Jesus,
and I think she’s living with her mother again.
I tell them that she’s driving truck.
She’s quit drinking.
She’s crafting candles from beeswax.
She’s selling them online.
She has at least three cats.
She says she’s done with men.
So, people ask me what happened, and
I tell them I don’t know.
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