(rewritten 1988) 

Finally, the telephone rings.
“Which is more inflationary?” you challenge,
“Madame Mao’s love of luxury?
Or America’s cornering the black murder marker
on stolen plutonium?”

I say that Bardot is now into fashion,
and I would like you to think
that that is my/her sole interest in the matter,
despite my complicity in voyeuristic, car-crash reports
to the contrary.
But then I remember one characteristic
of our pioneering days:
I prayed with the athletes of sixty million households,
then heard you describe over the megaphone
the intrapsychic conflicts of our bedroom scripts,
scenarios of winged pigs sprung from their camera cages
by our mutually neurotic revenge traumas.

There are moments I wouldn’t trade for a mountain of uranium.
But I don’t know if any of us should be dancing today.
I just lost all of my shame for a minute.
Remember when they fired the tracers
and lit the snow up all red?
This wild scissors of city betrayal keeps me on my toes.
I’m going to the surface to get a breath of air.
I’m going to pull away limbs when I’m falling down.
Facing the machine gun of the day-to-day
you’re the only girl I can touch.

Wife in a limbo, I get a taste of ashes in my mouth.
It comes down just inside that shrunken bedroom door,
your eyes teary and thumb hooked under front teeth…
my baby, my baby
I’ve got everything on my shoulders now
still holding the rosary in one hand
I’m ready for the ambush
some tomorrow out in a burst horse of glory

Can’t we meet halfway,
discover the path again without
self-conscious autobiographies
giving off the smell of ritual defeat?
I want to be your lover,
I want to be your man.

copyright,  © 1989, 2010 Chris Desjardins pka Chris D.

composed circa 1975-78; originally published in DOUBLE SNAKE BOURBON, reprinted in A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE.    

A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE is an epic, career-spanning anthology of Chris D.'s writings, published by New Texture. Buy it here.