Our Best Loved Waltzes
(for Jonathan Ceniceroz)

It's possible we have too much
information about the way "life works."
Who would have thought the morning, with
all its potential, would bring a private resolution
(over coffee with friends) to "keep things out,"
as though experience required editing even as it
washed over your skin, some bitchy but necessary obsession
with key lights and camera angles, ideas
about art brought down to the comfortable
level of catering, the legendary hours in
make-up that made Miss Dietrich...well, Miss Dietrich.

Not that I'm not
as sentimental about fearlessness as the next guy,
the beauty of flying brave flags on a promenade
down a dirty street -- a well-laid punch into
the solar plexus of sheer ignorance eliciting tears
of purest admiration but, somehow, no
impulse to join in, turn out the closets for a
stained bed sheet (sprinkled with spring flowers) and
leftover paint to make a banner defining
the moment which, from my place teetering
on the edge of the curb, has already passed, disappeared
in a tornado of paper and colored cellophane.

It's too fragile to believe in for any length of time, which
may be the problem, anyway. Casually bending
over backwards to check the straightness
of the drawn-on seams running down into your
sling-back pumps eventually becomes
a full-time occupation, gets lost in its own particular bitterness--
all the wild joys unshared, grimy from being handled,
put away "for later." Better to sink directly
into the tediously bourgeois than watch your wardrobe
trade its color for a cut that hides what time has taught you, props
up a hollow head on a slim stalk of ivory silk shot through with silver.

Happiness most likely lies elsewhere, under snow, some other
place where no-one else is looking. I'm tempted
to say "life" has no meaning, except that we feel that it does, walking
halfway home down some dangerous avenue clotted with people we
fear are carrying the disease of sadness and regret, marveling
at the slippery maroon plastic furniture in the window of the "Going
Out of Business Sale," injection-molded into coiled promises of endless
nights of hot, Tinsel Town sex on greasy polyester sheets. Climbing
into the popcorn-scented breeze from the "better" part of town, rung to
rung up shiny aluminum ladders forged from the kind and necessary illusions we
maintain about each other and ourselves, slightly above the headlights
of the oncoming taxis, and the rest of the world, now swept by Lotto fever.