By Virtue of North Pole

Vegetarian meatballs, two cans of pizza sauce, onion, garlic, olive oil, butter, a baguette, fresh shredded mozzarella and a wholesome salad with two kinds of blue cheese dressing.

“Why would you know?” his old friend says.

Okay, it’s just. But it really is kind of a rush, he thinks. Off to see her (his new friend), to abandon, to fantasy.

But they (the past in the present) had plans.

They had plans smashed to atoms.


















Both now reeling with the drunken microscope of thought inspection. They have it down to a science.

The clear and tearful séances of time. And are they kidding themselves, alluding to being worn out? Separate.

But pile the mash of fake meat into the slit of the sub.


















The music they've been writing together for years draws them back to a promising, once beloved confusion.

He wants to rush from here to new feelings, but he doesn’t want to rush songs still possibly to be born of the established connection.


















Like brutal wrestling without a mat, the bloody embrace seems to last forever. And how to let go? Submit?

What seabirds warble? What wet of the sea drips from their seashell beaks as they clip apart crabs?

They are outside of their past, though there is the sofa and there is the cat, a familiar pattern, a home in which they have alarmed each other many times before.

But truly, what she, his old friend, wrote and reads to him about the guy (a new man for her, now gone, dismissed by her), about sheep (cows?), just so clear and real to see in his mind, it startles him.

A whole movement of writing opens up around him. She's making it. Then he asks about the other guy, and she says, “I’m done with that.”

He has to get his own recent movements into the lens (something more about the woman, his new friend, who knows the guy, that fact hurting her, a disloyalty in him).

Little amoeba of feelings spray painted
on her wooden fence

a defense not hiding jealousy; there's jealousy
but she is not really jealous
he is not really jealous

He has to ask. “What does it mean if she wrote this and then I wrote back this?”

“It’s fine. But she knows you’re obsessed.”

He's not. Not yet. He doesn’t know what to think. He stays on watching TV with her. He doesn't go, not even when he sees her crying, talking to her mom on the phone.

He keeps composed. Tries to feel anything, feels nothing. Away from her ear, she holds her mother’s Sisyphus stories (getting a job, losing it, getting another, her drunken boyfriend screwing it all up again).

She's living, not dead, holding up a bouquet of irises.

Her eyebrows arch like rainbows as she holds the phone farther away.

Her mom stormily talks of her problems like a tiny ant trapped in a phone.

Though she must have some idea of the rainclouds in her daughter's eyes.

Her cat appears dizzy.

Or so he thinks. He wants to go.

But he stays with her because he starts to know that their storm is over. Over again.

Not even a final wrestling match. That too is something past.

Now is more like easing up, because it has to happen.

Like the sign of a rainbow. Or some peace not to be savored.