As If They Were Choices

Taking stock, I want to make a rhyme of it –
as if to beat some lilting time to it
would be to give it sense: who knows, perhaps it does:
for when I contemplate my batch of loves

and set them side by side before they wriggle off
to lose themselves in an embarrassed cough –
too fragile, too complex, and probably too small
to matter, really, very much at all –

the fact that I can make the first appear to swing
in assonance with who we were in Spring –
and I can make the second dance to devil’s trills –
perhaps convey a whiff of those dark thrills –

and I can draw a slow dirge from the third –
to let our aching loneliness be heard –
and I can render beats like punches to the head
to that drug-addled fourth love, and instead

of splaying out our chaos, find the pith
of how we managed to go on, and plead the fifth
was really just a wrestling mat for sex,
and cha-cha smartly through the vexing rest –

perhaps allows a chiming meter to emend
and bend the heart more softly, thus to lend
some solace and some meaning to the voices
I try to sound to comprehend my choices.


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