No Way Out

My guts this week, transistorized for easy maintenance.
Your hands fondle what's left.
I make excuses, excuses, excuses.
You hand me kleenex, call me another tourist.
The rain falls.
I turn psychotropic: creature from the black lagoon.
Mescaline therapy.
None of the above.
Alcohol, I tell you, cuts production of testosterone
by at least 2/3s.
But all you give is forgiveness.

I'm making prayers, making prayers, making prayers,
like license plates, renewable, this year.

(This comes at the end of my relationship with Pat Smith, circa 1981. I think it was actually three or four years before the actual fact. I was comfortable in that relationship, even though I knew it wouldn't work, was wrong. It wasn't right to put off ending it for so many years. I was pretty much a worthless asshole then.)

Dream Movie, 1978

So I ran the dream movie last night.
First time in many weeks darling;
but now it is always a dream
a vision of limbs and gold wire
and the fantasy grows with its details
becoming more precise:
you measured against the screen of me
buried deep within your tourniquet of flesh.
I can do it now, knowing it will never be real,
never disturbed by the lack of your care.
It's okay of course.
I'd rather be friends.
But it is a diminishing of the heart,
a failure of the soul.