agape

I tell you that you are beautiful,
I cannot tell the waitress that she is too
nor the man with a peckish face manipulating his dinner
with a cheap fork.

I tell the waitress that she is beautiful
through a couple of ugly dollars
that say "Have a drink on me, as is custom,
have a pack of cigs on me, as is customary
when we are rewarding beauty caged by
robot behavior."

Far better to reward broken robots,
the ones who paint the chaos of paint dribbles
across canvases of life, like the man who ambles
down the street with an antique cane, the woman
who in the middle of the night with the stars shining
few, speeds down the middle of my street in her
electric wheelchair, intent and with banner flying.

Tell me I am beautiful at the love novel factory
and I will point to my broken parts. You, if you mean
what you say, will understand, as you have always
understood. Emptiness fails to realize.
Voids entertain beauty in orbits leading to
loss, and only the black hole of the collapsed human heart
draws its own death towards it.

Tonight, I declare the obvious.
Love and trust are worth more than money and deceit,
which is not a question of value or measures
but a question of authenticity.
Can you buy life with lies?
(A marriage to a job and a car with a woman you
see for a few hours to have sex with is not a life,
but the worst deceit ever pulled on the human experience
by you and the others.)
Can a person fool another into loving and trusting them
for the rest of their life?
Like I said, hideous obviousness.

But, listen...the obvious should be beautiful too.
Who fashioned it so that those who speak in swords
about old wounds should be laughed off, persecuted,
written off as mad fools feeling out the horror of our
mutual prison? You and I in our half-measures of love?
Others in their full-measures of hatred?
The tattered spirit, much misunderstood, poisoning
our lives with pretensions of greatness placed their
by our own childhoods and derided as egos by
the miserable misinterpreters? Fuck them
and fuck me too.

The moon, some stars, a few rays of light,
a painted prison blooming like a garden
and a handful of old coins from the penny jar,
beaten copper amid the worn glass of the world.

You were the only one to show me your weapons
amid a people deluding others with things.
Light-knife kept in your boot, all I saw in
other shoes were crusted socks and outlines
of broken heels. All you needed was an interlude
to glint an edge from your ornate hilt. I needed
a hurricane of pages and letters, poor documents.

Let us walk as lovers separated in our two worlds,
I promise I won't laugh at your void, as
You have never insulted my emptiness.

Too many beautiful words, so few weapons.
Words without hope, weapons without wisdom.
And so on...