Not wanting to be an open book
We hide, like forgotten clothes, the passion
we consumed, until the house of which we recently have tired
collapses before we fully escape it. The remains of this life,
waiting like a meal, are pushed
aside for some semblance of predictable help
two souls pasted together by well-heeled passion
though tonight its expression may be curbed like a tire
(during lukewarm crisis of midlife)
of a car in which we first pushed
hungrily toward sex. They were of no particular help,
the characters in the book
like the dutiful wife tonight unheeded, tired
(as elsewhere in life)
of the mounds of chores towards which she is haplessly pushed
as if from behind, there's just no getting the proper help
these days, despite having lived more/less without complaining by the book.
No particular taste of passion
onto which we can wield, hoist or push
our wayward children to whom we now turn for help
knowing not what else to do & having abandoned all our books
or our hope in them in favor of "real life," or our passion
which is just a fiction as you remind me til I'm tired
of hearing it, as i seem to have been my whole life.
You would think someone might suddenly drop in (as if from above) to help
at such moments. "If you have a book,
you always have a friend." Now passionate
rather too much about reading, I wonder if I'm in fact tired
of the bookish life,
into which I was inadvertently pushed
having been a shy child, it may be noted, helped
chiefly by philosophical books,
the age of reason being, after all, my first passion,
until the age of 18 when of Sartre I finally tired.
Little did I know this train of thought would last my entire life
although i still can fancy jumping from a plane as if pushed
which indeed, I would have to be. Who wouldn't
have known or guessed that passion would help push us through, in the face
of tired bookishness, a hazardous life....