Twenty Years

 

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