Burn It

I met a woman with no one to love her.

Thinking then of my wife and daughters
I politely nodded, scurrying away
to a safe home on the edge
of the urban growth.

Is fidelity the result of my cowardice,
or is it the other way around?

She was too tired,
so I lay beside her
instead of on top
where I always want to be,
and I stroked her hair
until she told me
everything making her tired.

I don’t want to know all this,
because my angel is neutral,
caring naught for good or for evil,
but only for being oldest,
and having the most memory,
so he knows how things could be.

Never finding out
how to join responsibility
with my 15 year old heart,
the blood never drained
from my brain to make room
for the thin white broth of middle age.

All my friends,
their heads loll in tired acceptance,
and it drips off their earlobes.

I have only headaches;
too much oxygen
in the improper places,
and dreams of surviving
past the allotment, somehow,
of a man born in America.

But at least we are home in a house
someone else built for us.
And I am asleep next to this raging feminine fire.
The energy being spent here is too much
to understand with a mind of blood,
so I glow with my bulb of expectation
and I burn the fuel of our world:
this impossible endeavor of ownership.