The world famous motel singers have got something to tell me
at least that’s what they keep insisting
with their sequined tops swaying in the breeze while here I am
sitting in the driver’s seat
eating up some takeout
and wishing you were here with me
parked in front of this Ferris wheel
that is functionally on fire. Nostalgia gets the better of me
and I regret that. You appear as if out of nowhere
or the trunk. The motel singers come on the radio
to a thunderous applause that would shake a baby unto death
and you immediately arm a dozen nuclear missiles
and tell me that they can only be disarmed by genuine remorse,
which is a concept I have always had some trouble with
and o!, how I have missed the way
you carve your name on my face when you kiss me
right on my loud mouth!, but so anyway
I shoot the missiles down using my feelings or a handgun
and you ask me what that was all about. I tell you
that I am just waiting for something wonderful to happen.
You ask me what exactly I mean by that,
launching a volley of birds
who pin me to the ground and I tell you
that I don’t know what “something wonderful” means,
but I’m pretty sure it sounds magnificent,
like that time we dressed up as bandits
and walked into the bank and took everyone’s money
and made every single person there fall in love with us
and then we shot them full of holes and folded
what remained into airplanes
and mailed them straight to heaven
and then we moved into an empty apartment and went to sleep
happy. That night while I slept
you stitched trees to my back and sold me
to the city as a small forest or park
and then, after the check cleared,
that small forest or park burned to the ground
under “mysterious circumstances,” and after that
I woke up. I went to the hospital
where I received a brand new back
that was fireproofed, and gleaming.
The kind and buxom nurses
told me to maybe start thinking
about possibly even taking it easy
and I smiled at them as long as I could
because I am not impolite
and then I got into a car and I drove out to our apartment,
and you walked out the door
and told me you’d missed me
and shot my leg in the leg. I grew a new one
using my feelings and it,
like my feelings,
has got your name carved on its face
because that’s how we talk about making out.
You asked me if I remembered the time you buried me alive
and told everyone that I was what killed the dinosaurs.
I told you about this movie I’d seen,
the one where something wonderful happens.
You said that you had never seen anything like that
and I said I’d take you to see it
and then I stuffed you in the trunk
while the radio sang a song just for you
with pedal steel guitars and weeping women
and the world’s smallest violin. All I ever wanted
was for us to find some common ground and build a life upon it.
You tell me you know just what I mean. Meanwhile
I am begging you,
and the motel singers are begging you,
and the polar bears are begging you,
and the sea of love is begging you,
and my unappeasable sadness is begging you,
and god is begging you, and the ghosts are begging you,
and the president!,
the president is begging you,
and our five hundred children are begging you,
and we are, at this very moment, cueing up the strings
and the whole world is holding its breath.