For Thomas
I spent last month
touching socks in hotel rooms with you
and eating toothpaste all over the world.
It was rather swell
to run with you for a
few weeks of private
cars, private conversations, quiet meals.
In Dresden,
your eyes dated you, so we got some
Surgery. The woman next to
us was about to choose the gender of her second baby.
That made my genes feel tight, so I unzipped
them, walked around, got some chemicals in a paper cone.
Drank down cold. You wiggled your feet,
nervous I guess about having indefinable eyes.
The big breasted nurse was something out
of the 1960’s and she did what I could not
and soothed your worries.
Socialist hospitals are so clean and so white;
pleasantly different than
America told us it would be.
Aperitifs waited for us at every table, and they made us
less hungry for food, more so for one another.
We talked long nights and
you missed Penny, still do,
since she was such a famous girl.
Last month was swell.