THE GAMES WE USED TO PLAY

We Can't Go On Meeting This Way

If my voice, my smile seem
as intimate to you as your own
(yours seem my own), it's because
you and I met long ago in a dream
(which is where first meetings happen),

a dream I'd thought my own
until the day my setting sun
surprised me
with a tint of airy blue
I'd never put there.
Thus the game began:

I put forth Romeo and Juliet. You
covertly took over Juliet, and
when my Romeo's avid lips drew near,
your Juliet's tiny teeth nipped off his nose.
I did a quick fade out (stifling
an earthquake of giggles, thinking--
one of us thinking--"Will Romeo
be rebuilt in a day?"--

fade out to a long white beach
with palm trees and crashing surf.
You turned into an old airplane
and sputtered across the sun,
dragging a Coca Cola sign. I became
an ack-ack gun, you an elegant finger
plugging my gun barrel. I became a
crocodile, jaws closing over the finger,
which became a stick thrust crossways
to prop open my jaws--

TOO TRITE!
Go back to the gun...no, the finger, no,
just play it out (I said, you said, we...)--

and so into the soft sky rises our
crocodile, trailing a Coca Cola banner,
and, flaring to lurid orange,
sets slowly in the Western sky.


[Note: What sorts of games would we play if we were immortal beings capable of creating things to be and being those things (bodies, trees, cars, oceans, planets, suns)? And even capable of creating universes? It seems to me our games would be aesthetic. And often they'd be silly. We wouldn't go around being nothing but sublime. Our Jonathon Livingston sea gulls would crap on lovers. Our serene sunsets would surprise us with farts. We'd have fun. And maybe we did. Maybe under cover of the agreed-upon solidity of "reality," we still play these games, calling them "mere imagination."]
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Dean Blehert
Blogs:
http://deanotations.blogspot.com (short poems)
http://dearreader08.blogspot.com (essays and longer poems)
New book (Deanotations, Volume 1) available at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/deanotations-volume-one/4649669
WWW.BLEHERT.COM