Dear Pop

Everything we do and say in patriarchy can be traced

back to “Strangers in the Night.” Your faded jeans, my

faint daytime smile. (Dazzling’s so expensive.) Bad

Mailer novels; lose-money-quick schemes. A fortune in

friendship, nevertheless. Beef farmers favor self-flesh

awareness. (Or brittle in toffee queen regimes.) Thoughts

as feats of strength. The figure in the woodpile as a

white snake, two needle bites. The end of the week, of

us, strangers now or not? I’m dressed in white, I am the

right blonde in the wrong seaplane, I haven’t learnt the

language yet. The meta-leopards will have taken over

the aquarium. They’ll stroll this way like kangaroos to

green glass. Papa, I’ve upset you. There’ll be a line of

songs like crystals lining up to kiss the bell that says Big

Town. We are on the roof now, playing to Central Park

everyone hot in their coats. Paid for not stolen. They

admit to being too late for miracles, for charity. The

poem’s parents are in the front row. The poem’s friend

interprets. Can we repeat it without going back to the

start, the lover’s demand like ants beneath the plaint?

In Eden, in Athens, estrangement flowers. We turn and

return. Is it love itself, beckoning from the lurid grass-

lands? There’s a cuteness to plaster’s novelty hiding of

the body. People are cited in the mouth, stand on the

ground. They fly like Lucy. You can deny it all for fun

and parties, as if the mind was the feeling that input

gives. It’s a power no one likes to admit, as it so often

leads to failure in later life, like living in a swimming

pool, or losing your tongue in the mail. What of

romances with characters from books? Alice says hello

I remind her of a cookie in a dream she had of heaven or

hell—but which was it? Everything that happens in the

world has someone to say it’s their fault, repress it as

they may. The cutout in the cocktail bar wants to go

home with someone for once. The snakeskin hangs on

the gate like it’s a street corner, that each uttered “baby”

renews. Knowing can be a means to forgetting, also

We stand there as if the floor or wall is our companion

our fortress in trouble: mates a bit longer, keeping sex at

bay. Not everyone looks where they’re going or cares

where others are. They’re the rugged ones, though fleet

as moths when crossing a highway. Sometimes, despite

our own egos, we admire this, as if wise that the pattern

of the one ahead won’t ultimately save or brave us

Don’t rush. The star we wake to mightn’t always be

there, so we wander outside as if air were itself a prayer

or someone’s. Is that for me? addressing an ivy or a wet

plank, suddenly hungry. Tell me what happened to Peter

and Wendy and the loser with the hook for a hand. Was

it all alright in the end? They say time is nothing but it

takes the saying to make it so. To be the one is to

vanquish Sinatra, but also life (not that life is patriarchy)

Repress the possibility for the sake of staying young, as

around the bend a boat may contain the set of problems

that will have always been around. Attitudes to dancing

housework, contraception, ever music’s themes. A wall-

flower may remind themselves of wallpaper, peeling to

reveal a peasant who goes to sleep at dusk behind their

tux, but does that haunt you more than the possibility

of possessing truth? Is that what your glances are about?