Can anything besides boredom defeat romance? Stop me—boredom is just a love song sung in eliminations, as hands love the hours with tucked thumbs and weather invents the charts’ devotion; What our eyes do to prose.
Intelligence is romantic. I wrote that down but I also remembered. The opposite of what’s real is not fancy. Someone else finished that thought, beautifully.
My parents mailed me pictures of my dog in another woman’s jewelry. I look at the pictures like a challenge; I show them off.
How do you explain the inseparable number of things without the impatience
of import? Bring it all to shore, as we do in sentences. This is a sentence. And someone else, with a footnote.
I could start again, to shore; give up the index for a human traffic light.
What I mean is just that if the gates are really gone we’ve been more watchful than we thought: narrow if not permissive, deliberate if not careful. Not sure, letting anything amount to consent.
“When speaking Russian, a self is felt but has no proper name.” But in English we’re cowboys: bridled romance carries us from context to noun.
We cup a landscape for its porcelain rim and trace it, only. This is the meaning of a palace of time, the sanctity of tubing down the river.
I am devoted, then, to a charged tedium, a slack interest. At The Office of Weary Surprises, I regulate summer temperatures. When the clock says to, I lead company exercises: stare and hum, stretch the truth, saddle up and weep.