Rose-Colored Gas Masks in NoLa
What's it like down south pal?
Are the alcohol-breathed square dancing women tickling your fancy?
Oh! How their coital parasites tickle
your no longer fancy!
I'm sorry for your loss.
Anyways, I'm writing you because I'm lost too.
I raced the upper threshold of time with unknowing futility,
as my train was running express.
One hundred years have passed.
Now I'm stuck on the present's periphery,
wondering how in the world the eye doctor
got my prescription so wrong
and it took me this long to notice
I've been wearing glasses that made my vision
just foggy enough to deprive me of living
without sparking investigation.
How is the land of rose colored gas masks treating you?
Those lyrical hedonists buzzing around all through the night in vain.
Have you given into the illusion as well?
Are you having so much fun that one hundred years unwittingly passed you too?
Except your century-long hole of oblivion wasn't stolen.
The loss doesn't ring inside you with shock.
With the guarantee of our distance
you opted out of memory like unchecking a box,
unsubscribing to an email list you never signed up for.
I'm not sure the vague notion of boots in unison tapping on a fiberglass floor can fill memory's shoes,
but I know that our bodily magnetic mixups
are doused in the presence of emptiness.
Your love was just negation,
pain in the loss of my presence.
The deeper down you fell in negation’s black-hole force majeure
(that shapeless abyss whose unlimited thirst would swallow the entire universe),
the more powerful the force between our thrashing limbs.
So from the memory of being without came the routine affirmation of our mutual addiction.
I wish your name sparked enough in me to power surge all of New Orleans,
but two illusions do not make a current.
At most a lonely draft will stir naked trees in an anonymous midwestern field,
but even thats a stretch for a two week love story.