Lobotomy

 

Elections are contested and cheated.

Ballots angrily counted, recounted.

Political ads blare a million dollars a minute

as kids in Africa drink from mud puddles

in National Geographics.

Wildfires burn on TV.

Hurricanes named after dead grandmothers

harass the coast.

Evacuations. Disease.

Kids with cancer on infomercials,

and commercials for beer and Rogaine.

Rape apes. Police shootings, policemen mourning.

Riots and rage. Activists.

Movements for the sake of movement.

Monuments upended.

Houses shot up, robbed, vacated

but for the bedbugs.

Pit bulls on rusty broken chains.

Heroin junkies dead in the alley veins.

 

Bills piled up a mile high. Past due accounts.

Junk mail floods the dining table

waiting to be cut up into snowflakes, or paid.

Radios play Huey Lewis more than the Beatles.

My Sharona, instead of Sinatra.

Protesters protest protesting protestors.

Run over by cars.

Immigrant caravans at the backdoor.

My flowers for you brown in vases

leaving crinkly ashes of death to sweep.

Leaves smother the green grass

from skeletal trees as the cold chokes

the cathartic warmth of summer’s dying breath.

 

The sun has abandoned everyone.

Not only me. It has abandoned you.

We cast no shadow to see.

Teachers screw kids in broom closets.

Insurance premiums rise. Wages dip.

Stocks plummet, paint fades, windows crack.

Telemarketers call from Calcutta

to sell extended warranties and life insurance.

Wrinkles crease my pale face

whose summer tan has faded, you noted.

This is the outside world.

The one that doesn’t exist when I am with you. 

 

There are no bills, no wildfires, no protests.

No elections for anything.

No pedophilic teachers, priests. No wrinkles.

No leaves falling anywhere. No insurance premiums.

No migrants. No media.

No heroin. No stocks, credit scores,

department store liquidation sales.

Not on your couch.

There are no starving children in your bed.

Nothing to be sold or bought.

No cancer. No Huey Lewis. No news.

There are Strawberry Fields forever

and a warm summer wind.

 

There are no wildfires in your eyes.

No body-count. No floods.

No hurricanes in your laugh

or on the shores of your cheeks.

No ash borers in your hair

or bedbugs in your teeth.

No junk mail or ballots in your words.

No commercials.

No elections for anything at all.

There is a Garden of Eden. A warm beach.

There is warmth. Peace. Civility. Humanity.

There is sanity, reprieve, and hope.

There is beauty like nothing I’ve known before.

I don’t like leaving you or your world

and I feel much the way a lunatic must

fleeing a burning sanatorium.

 

The heart wants what it wants.

I wish to burrow down into it as far as I can go

and never leave.

I carry pieces of it with me. In pockets.

On a wristwatch. Memories painted on my eyelids.

A picture on a phone.

The smell of you on my skin.

I hate to think what if the world that is you did not exist –

that I had imagined it,

or impregnated myself with my own dreams.

Or if I had no passage there.

If I saw you, but you did not see me.

If I was a migrant at your cold gate

fated to my ruined past.

You are my asylum. My America.

You are my Mars.

You are my paradise lost every day,

but found again by evening.

That gothic castle which stands

still behind century-old sycamores on a tall hill.

 

You are my dream, my dream girl.

You are love.

My unicorn. My pot of gold.

My super-jackpot winning lotto ticket.

All the right numbers, all at once.

My stairway to Heaven. My perfect drug.

My overdue lobotomy.

But what am I to you?

Am I harmless trespasser

who flatters you too much?

Looks at you too often.

Fantasizes of you too grandly?

One who dreams of you too recklessly?

Am I a gardener? A caretaker? A patient patient?

A door? The door?

 

I do not always know. Or know if I ever knew.

I am only that which you allow me to be

because I can be nothing else in your world.

I wish for isolation inside of you

and for that which you cannot give me –

for you’ve already given it away.

But maybe, someday.

It is easier to love what is gone than he who is in front of you.

And you cannot take what has left for granted.

We want the things that don't want us,

and want less what wants us more.

Not me, though. I want more what wants me.

 

I watch mice do Hamlet on a splintered stage

in the dark musty auditorium where the lunatics

used to play basketball in ’34,

unaware of a world outside of them.

The mice don’t know I’m watching their last dress rehearsal

before they perform for the cats

who have no real interest in theatre.  

I am smiling inside of you.

How long will it last, love?

How long must I wait for the curtain?

Someone asked me what comes after the mice do Hamlet.

And I said nothing at all.

 

I don’t count on you the way you can count on me.

It is as foolish as counting on summer to last

and leaves never to fall.

But there are no endings if you believe only in beginnings.

Take my last compliment before I leave –

You are all the romantic beauty in the world to me.

God gave me to you, not to be returned.

There is an empty seat by me.

When will you come? Will you?

A lobotomy cannot be undone

and there is no tragedy greater

than to be the mouse in love with the cat.