useless art

“I can’t be involved,
because it’s too good
to be alone.”

She sits in her apartment
in Brooklyn, on the phone,
talking to her ex-boyfriend
in Newington,
reading from her diary,

each entry a sequence
of cut-up catchphrases,
summations long removed
from the moment
of the event

but there’s a pause, and then
“Dave and I fought again,”

and I’m back in my car
yelling at her,
hiding what I mean to say
behind the words I’m yelling,
and she looks past me,
out the window
at the moon

and that’s what I hear in her voice
as she tells me this story -
she’s gone, far from all this
crass static and rural
desperation, beyond
my reach:

right after we met,
she was already leaving me,
just as I planned to leave her,
eventually,

every word one more
firm foot aimed towards
the door, every blank stare
a dry kiss goodbye.

Now, three years later,
she’s lonely in her new apartment,
and I’m alone in my living room,
and I’m waiting for her
to ask me to talk
about myself

but I never have anything
to offer - no girl trouble,
no news from Newington,
nothing save some platitudes
about her life, her problems.

Just more words
to send across long thin wires,
noise that trickles from ear to hand
to a loosely bound book
wrapped in black fabric
set on a nightstand
under an unlit lamp,

and a cradled phone
somewhere in New York,
somewhere in Connecticut.