I know we can live without love...

MILDLY FREE

A film of love can be shot in any direction, I know

a guy with a gondola blotting the sky; his other helicopter cries

about an outbreak of renewed influenza that has hit

this bald eagle town under average war-like pretense,

we pull our daisies, chainsaw the living spaces,

swallow small medicines, and select corrugated metal sheets

for a blank-faced reverie and bloodlet collectibles

that remedy same soft underbelly situations.

Even I never thought I’d have jowls until I looked through

the mirror of glad girls, a subsidy of the Lie Group for Women

and other feminine needleworks. But let’s return to recreational

knitting now. I still don’t know how

to let go of the keyhole and pry myself loose

from this dream of constant segues—

I know we can live without love from the waist up

and the kind that flows from up above, even horses

that speak our language, but the rest remains

a place we frequent with panty-laced desire and rely upon

for everywhere with bonus scenes as yet in production,

postoperative and pre-season. Like an apricot foam,

the hand that strokes a felt-like rose stem assumes

where it’s moving and when it’s moving in.

Still waiting for you, an order of peony nuns blooms

at advance screenings to inform me you don’t know

the patience I equate with deserving, my miscalculation

on the footfall of coincidence in sexual remission with hindsight.

That premier of my badness, my blunder, my driven misgivings

for all things invisible will appear at the Garden tonight.

As is the common case though, you didn’t know my name

when you sent a note addressed to spell simple errors out:

I’m nobody’s flavor of the month and this matter holds

no righteous incense, no good odors, no fresh thigh skin to sniff.

It reminds me of how many behaviors ignore the soul’s inner lining.

Remember the way the cherry blossom words looked up

at the sun and asked, How did we get here and to what objects

do we belong? Our evenings were a bit like that, full of torpor

and mini masquerade balls in rusty brown arm chairs tied

side-by-side while we waited for the world to surrender

her love for the brotherhood of armies.

I’m still okay, except for the part where things went terribly wrong,

cleaning a few mug shots with our teenage FBI, we caught

a glimpse of persons who looked a far cry from our top shelf selves,

and thus we assumed all aliens, foreigners, wombats, and spies

would one moment be divided by cardboard and fiberglass wires,

and the next, at some bakery sharing humble pie.

So we gave away our savings, cracked open the canned goods,

and made our prayers for the end of secondary slavery

until the parental gestures were never again enough to protect

our species from accidental babies with their unpredictable offspring.

In the final credits, the mountains claimed their original heights

and the oppressor began his move over us, redux.

--Amy King, from I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU