I Did Not Know, When I First Said I Love You, I Was Thinking About Thinking

While you get high with your therapist, I’m smoking a spliff in a cemetery, reading
about the Birds of Tennessee, wishing we were playing house in New York.
The art is beautiful
everywhere, but all descriptions of art are the same.
Theory elides the gap between aesthetics and ethics.
The great
horned owl lives in the suburbs. I’m dismayed
to learn the barred owl is not a bard owl.
When you ask, Is this good? what do we mean?
Often, morally good is aesthetically bad. Therefore, often, too, morally bad is aesthetically good.
Your eyes narrow.
Are we good? We’re fighting again
in line at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and we can’t leave until you finish your glass of milk.
It’s comical:
the silence. Our dates
keep going sideways. Habibi, have a Coke with me—
You hate Coke. I don’t care about the Coke. I want the having
and the with me. I know
it’s pathetic. The ticking sound of the watch I used to wear, pressing your ear while we make out
in our favorite bookstore, pulling us out of time itself. You
remind me, the Coke is the context for the having.
It is important.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, sure, but can we even remember what we love
about each other when
I hate you. Sometimes, I really fucking hate you. I’m pleading, and plea is the origin
of pleasure. I’m desperate. We have written plans
on how we separate, what to do
about the house. We have not shown them to each other, and it is, perhaps, a fear of that
specific, lonely part being
known, and, separately, of telling the kids
that brings us
together again. It never ends
with you. Even if this poem ends, with you, it
never ends. We
ask so much of art
because we want it to say what we are afraid to. Here’s a thing I made. I don’t know
what it means. We regulate our nervous systems when we notice we have them.