Love Games
You’ve been deeply depressed and complaining about shit for nine months straight.
It occurred to me today that I should remind you how in our 20s, we spent evenings
relentlessly board-gaming, your competitiveness and tendency to win up against
my performative cheating, sliding my red pawn Home with the edge of my pinky
when you glanced at your phone, dropping unearned pieces into my pie
when you left the couch to dig through the fridge for a beer,
but now you grump all the time, you’re overwhelmed and sad,
intolerant to noise, your voice buried in a mantle of stress.
Once, long ago, your holy lamentations sprung from too little time in a day
to give life to the swell of song in your body, but now the dog has to shit,
the dishes are endless, your work knows no bounds, and there’s a patch of ice
on the bottom step waiting for prey.
Like everyone, we carry new hollows in our hearts,
these past two years the wreck of how we used to know things, how we did them.
We tucked ourselves into a small, protective ball
and I unfolded before you did.
I’m waving to you.
Please come out.
Everything is still broken.
Do you remember how I hated that song you wrote for me once,
about how you’d love me even when I was old and no longer beautiful,
and how I lectured you about how lame it was that you were the hero
saving me from inevitable invisibility, how the patriarchal lie of fading charms
would not stop me from savoring the passage of time, from perennially blooming,
from dancing in wild elation at the fucking improbability of our existence,
and here we are a decade later, pouring love into one concentrated place,
our kaleidoscopically clever child who is kaleidoscopically challenging,
the only person I’ve met more prolific than you.
Come back to me, mischievous friend!
I can see you.
Do come play!
Will you break from the stress to remember how long ago we collapsed in the grass
of a golf course, exhausted from all of the touching, sprinklers set to midnight timers
suddenly releasing powerful jets of water, your face below mine
contorting when your asshole took a direct hit?
You couldn’t run away - in our communion you’d lost your glasses -
and from the safety of a summer maple I watched you high-step
like a newborn fawn through the wet grass, blind, naked from the waist down.
When you reached me, water dripping from your hair,
back in the grass we went.
Honey, stop scowling!
Don’t make me buy you a shotgun and a rocking chair.
A wool blanket for your lap.
Don’t let this world bleed you of sublime word and song,
all your shades of blue.
Come close.
Look around.
Let me whisper some blasphemous thing in your ear, wait, wait,
are you laughing, just one more, let me find a pointy stick to slay the raptor
that daily rips your liver from your ribs and pecks it to shreds,
let me yank open your folded arms, kick you from the cliff,
plunge your head into icy waters, douse your heart and throw a match to it.
Honey, I can see you.
Come play with me, goddammit!
When you’re not looking I’ll slip an extra piece into your pie,
edge your blue pawn Home with a subtle finger,
blend color into your monochromatic sleep.
I’m a profligate cheater and I’m helping you win,
you won.
Let us hold hands and together be unrepentant,
let us see what gold we can mine from our grief,
let us see what greets us in the warmth we make
from these long cold nights.