We've been together 20 years you say
This when I whisper to you lets stop seeing
Each other then as you repeat the charge
We are spending too much time together
Time as if it were some constant on which
We measure our devotion going back all those
Years when so many weekends we performed
Coffee houses or went to the parties of our
Mutual friends those early days of revelries
Which gave way to bad sex between us that
We accepted as an intimacy we both agreed
Was beneficial to us do we feel any longer
Those urgencies of that time feel any longer the
Urgency climbing into my bed your bed a guest bed
Hugging each other to give that comfort desired
Comfort shared in a friend's guest suite on Lake Rabun
Has anything changed in twenty years are we once
Again struggling with the same old old questions what
To do how often do it how to make our love anew
Where to find adventure and love of life as time wrecks
Us both
What a revelation for me to hear for two full hours
Your wise psychiatrist say with conviction how
Vital my love for you is asking me to spend more
Time with you to help you get through the life changes
You face help you find genuine independence from
Your parents who have never understood you never
Grasped your intelligence your creativity wanting a
Normal child to work to find a wife to settle down
Or what what would they do deny you money
Push you not towards becoming a free self-reliant
Adult but a child again not thirty-five but fifteen
Needing them for every thing as they need you in
Old age or what what what commitment to an insane
Asylum forget the euphemism a place where a nurse
Will inject your troubles away, tuck you into bed
Contemporary lobotomy
We have wisdom yes philosophers Sartre and
De Beauvoir to guide us in our non-monogamous
Pursuit of rich relationships not jealous not possessive
Ties that don't bind but nourish our creative spirits
We see though the emptiness and meaningless routine
They push us ever more toward not knowing not
Imagining the damage they are doing to us to us both
So like Nietzsche, the thought of suicide gets us through
The dark nights for now and we hold on to our twenty years
Knowing that alone we won't work the paths to happiness
Will evaporate in the heat of the summer in a world in which
Hope dies dreams die we die
You surrender to the demands of your parents and I to the
Demands of my aging body in a world that finds the old
To be in the way out of touch lost incapable De Beauvoir's
Words echoing down through our last years months weeks
Days our deaths
Yet we had honest to god love for twenty years didn't we
