THE UNBEARABLE SLIGHTNESS OF BEING

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

Another dawn fulfills its pledge to the calendar.
Another day finds me searching for my name.
Angst must be kept at bay with constant distraction.

I wander through the crowd in a Mylar suit.
(Gotta short between the ears, I hear somebody say.)

Funny clowns--buncha balloons...
Baby lets go and WHOOSH--it's bye bye.
The first in a long string of lessons.
(A child cries in the jungle under the Jurassic sun--
Some things never change.)

Girls in poodle skirts on porch swings,
Parchesi in the parlor, and Father Knows Best.
Secretly, we replaced this couple's coffee with Sanka brand.
(Secretly, she wants to be defiled in the basement.)
TASTES LIKE SHIT! she exclaims.
That one doesn't make it on the air.

The come-hither eyes from across the room.
The radio singing: I ll never learn to be
just me first by myself.

Cruising through Memphis at midnight.
(Do I really feel the way I feel?)
She is nearly in my lap.
I said you can work the gearshift--
she made her own interpretation.

Packed my bags and headed west.
(I've left a few things out.)
West of somewhere.
East of someplace else.
A matter of perspective.

No one knows where they really are.

And when I turn to look back, 
The memory of you 
And you 
And you 
Turns to salt.

And were it not for gravity
I'd have floated clean away by now,
avoiding all the fuss
like a pink balloon
under the August moon--
or Uncle Albert dodging the pigeons
before their nightly bowel movement.

Past the screaming bullets.
Past the starving children.
Past the glaciers cascading into the sea.

Somewhere there's a reason.
Maybe I can see it from way up here.