Your Batch of Loves

Taking stock, you want to make a rhyme of it –

as if to beat some lilting time to it
would give it sense: perhaps it does:
for when you contemplate your 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 you can make the first appear to swing
in assonance with who you were in Spring –
and you can make the second dance to devil’s trills –
invoke a potent whiff of his dark thrills –

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

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

may now allow a chiming meter to amend
and bend the heart more softly, thus to lend
a tender meaning and remembrance to the voices
you now sound to comprehend your choices.



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