as long as we’re both standing on this dance floor

Can I tell you?

I have this very poor habit of doubting the people who offer me Clydesdale carriage rides up Seventh Avenue at three in the afternoon after asking if I’m seeing anybody, who send me home with bags full of grapefruit and persimmons, baleful pouches of rice and sometimes jasmine, and plates guarded by steamed vegetables coated in seeds of sesame.
I do not believe that they will call again or send me letters or write me characters or know my name if more than one week slips under my door without me opening it to one of their visits.
Because my subjective realities are strewing cadavered casualties everywhere that I walk, and, despite switching apartments, Family still sounds like a four letter word, and my favorite animal is Homo sapien, even though I have no heart left for the primitive.
And I never invite and I never say thank you and I never shake hands and I may never learn how to hold a hug from you or make love to you or become you or be becoming to you or take you for my own and ask, mystical in wonder, in the quiet beneath a tarp tent shining a flashlight, like a child bored by lullabies –
– if I can keep you.
Because one shouldn’t be selfish. And I can’t make straight lines between the nursery rhyme lessons of old and what this adult now holding the chalk deserves to have, if maybe for one minute, which typically lasts for the length of a ringing minor chord on the steel guitar playing in the corner, throwing out the suggestion,
Be Happy.
O Don’t Worry.
Be Happy. Be Happy.