Fool for love

1.
After forwarding on the email about one word that
Describes you
I notice that most of my forwarded addresses are to all the men
I’ve loved since you.

And loved as badly as one can, when looking for a replacement..

Each one sends back things they never told me when
They could have.

I am surprised to find that they have a certain surety of their place

In my heart, as if I loved only them,
as if the love we shared was
Something above the normal disappointing sex and emotional
Blackmail ….,modern day romance being so easily
Full of shit. .

The ones that send the best bits are the ones I never even kissed.

men do not want the real person in here

But something they can wrap around their fantasy soul mate,
or wife or sex kitten or intellectual companion
Or platonic star-crossed lover.

I am all of those things.

2.
I took a picture personality quiz on face book the other day
The results said I am cosmopolitan, fashionable and ambitious.
Physically
Passionate and need to take care of myself so I don’t break.

I think they mistook my taste for lobster as something I got in

restaurants
When the truth is, my penniless uncle and step dad used to fish
them for free
Off the coast of California.
We ate dozens of them in my childhood, large and red and
screaming in the pot
I never wanted to free them, I wanted to drop them in.
Would beg for my turn. The claws flailing about until they were
ready to eat.

Nothing ever tasted so succulent again.

The choices of cars and dream houses, those fantasy places to

live
in the test were nothing remotely near
what I really want.
I want a volkswagen Bahia convertible. A hand built wooden yurt
in the Oregon hills with two cats. A lunking intellectually fine tuned
madman with dark eyes and an appetite for my
body.
I want to start singing again.
In fact, I want to die singing onstage in front of ten best friends
and a music critic who will declare posthumously that I am a lyrical
genius.

But those aren’t listed and so

I pick the closest choice.

My whole life is that way, actually.

Never having the thing I really desire within reach
I will naturally gravitate for the next best option,

After years of this, I have a metallic taste in my mouth.

The only two things I ever got for real were

The land in Texas which I paid for in blood
marred by the dead fathers ashes
And
You.

Of all of them. You were the one real thing that I never expected.

3.
There was, of course, nothing real about you.
You are a concocted figment of your own imagination, we know
The best part of us was the drama you wrote between my thighs.

You have trans-mutated so many times to fit the carnivorous

dream of
Yourself, I don’t know how you breathe,
Such language like silly putty
Or that disappearing ink we used to get as kids.
Nothing you ever said to me remains.
But my love was real. And I suppose that is the deal.
However, the innocence that gave it its incandescence is gone.

4.
Juan writes that I am ‘striking’ and in a postscript tells me he is still
hot for me/
I remind him that the last time I was in town, he conveniently
invented a girlfriend
To avoid seeing me.
He reminds me of the way his mouth and hands slide over my
curves
How wet I was when he came into me.
I remind him that one night is not enough to decide about anything
as important as
Lust. He reminds me that we could never have topped perfection
which is
Probably true.

The German priest refuses to participate and asks how he

possible could use one word not in his native language and easily
misinterpreted by me to describe the indescribable thing that we
were and were not.
We lived joined at the hip for three years, longing for something
nameless
A home, a connection that would last and not touching.
He would never hug me, perhaps knowing
alcohol and loneliness could ease us over
An edge we would regret later. But
How did I have the heart to tell him, I would have regretted
Nothing. His and God’s relationship was none of my doing
And besides, my theology teaches me
god lives between the spaces of our breath in the dark.

The Irishman who charmed me by mail

put me up for the night in Belfast,
sends me the kinds of emails my brother might send.
Anecdotes and information tidbits
This game I have forwarded on.
We started with the hum of curiosity and whimsy,
drank and had monkey sex with little consciousness and numb
joy.
We stand here stuck at what now,
neither wanting to give up freedom or options.
He fishes for a word that will impress me.
it does.

I would be more impressed with naked desire.

5.
Ah, the stupidity of desire, the foolishness of lust.
The phone calls, the frantic meetings,
the time running out against your last orgasm
the hurried train ride back to the 1000th goodbye
the tears and the making up
And the lies. Oh god, don’t forget the lies
which drip down my cleavage
rip out my heart make me aware of the blood pumping
Through it..
Such aphrodisiacs are only forged
by madmen and callow youth.

6.
The poet I fell for as a girl still sends me
little tokens of his esteem.
I find each word delicious . I write him poems I never send.
I don’t want to see the dullness creep into his language in
response.
He trusts our asexual selves,
fears the demands of love and women, especially one like me.
He is probably right.

He hovers in my heart like the falcon

I always had a thing for birds of prey. He thinks his talons are
dangerous.
I keep looking at his unfurled wings myself.

7.
I am alone in London, suffering from a too wide bed.
For the first time in my life I wear pyjamas.
The cool sheets on my naked body would remind me there is
no hard body next to mine to turn to.
I have the steady drip of loss and love
like a Chinese torture in my head..

So I refuse to forget or to hope.

I refuse to settle down to middle aged respectability.
I refuse to close the open window in my moonlit room that
searches the
World for one more fool for love.

If I forget what it looks like

-Love-
I will dry up and shrink down and become the shadow
Of the woman who turned to you on a dance floor at a wedding
and said,
‘let’s get out of here’.

Whatever you took from me,

its nothing in the face of that.