Ralph Angel, Committing Sideways

This might hurt a bit, stabbing away at conversation
when we could be quiet or snoring, I mean
waking up sick is tomorrow’s business; (we like to say
that it wears our clothes). But what’s substantial
is the soulful intersection of the needs and obligations
of good friends ridiculing each other. It’s a chance

we don’t hesitate to take, and we’re a shambles,
aren’t we? These arms don’t work anymore. Better stack
them
over here, where the suntans fell off our faces. And yes,
that’s the old philodendron walking out in your slippers,
but forget it, it’s nothing, the whole place and its aura
of lived-in azaleas are resting on tentative sands.

Funny little murmurs of free fall. Now we’re
getting somewhere, so close and, therefore, so disappointed,
like slap-happy derelicts leaning on parking meters
after the shoppers have thinned away, and yet from them
emanates an excited kind of trust that can also turn inside-
out
and make visible what has remained so secret.

And we each say, “Well, here’s to you, Bub,” as the last
jokes collide with the things we most
despise in ourselves, which march across the table like
crummy
peanut butter sandwiches in day-glo trenchcoats-whoops,
there they go-right through the breathy curtains,
right past the worry that we may be anything but
deadly serious when they return to us, as they always do,
when we’re alone, and that our having to think about them
will hold us too safe and too separate, our feet
squarely planted in dreaded plots of ground.