WE DON'T WRITE POEMS

There was no naked Jungian dreamworker breaking our piano with her high-heeled shoe when we got home, friends; there was never a naked Jungian dreamworker.

There were no bums in dirty yellow pants crawling over us when we made love to Magda the doll-maker on the moldy clothes beneath the Goodwill trailer.

We made it all up. We were just kidding. We were just faking. We were just trying to get attention.

There was no son of an Irish diplomat coming after us when we stole his neglected girlfriend, and he did not pound us with pots from our own kitchen as he cursed us with Dylan Thomas poems in the middle of the winter night.

We were not famous. We did not encourage our admirers to have sex in public. There were no gorgeous Catholic crones humping the home-made crucifix when we woke in the bright August afternoon.

We never went home with the Russian translator of Gogol and finger-painted her white wall to match the maps of the solar system that we used to love to draw as children. We never put her underpants on our heads and sang Rimbaud songs in her mouth until she cried a thousand years of joy.

She wanted us to but we didn't.

There were never any magic housewives our own age trying to convince us that we would someday be mayors and shamans and environmentalists. They did not tell us to wise up and control our cocks better, and they did not make fun of our poems.

The truth is, we were already mayors and shamans and environmentalists in our dreams, we controlled our cocks better because we were tired of fucking too many different women who were too good for us, and we did not write poems.

But the main thing is, we did not let Liz Beth piss down on us through her red lamé pants from the top of the oak tree in the parking lot behind the Catalyst bar. There was no gentle hot stream falling down through the mist on our hands and faces.

We did not get turned on; we did not crawl around the tree yapping and barking. There was no beautiful young nursing mother who was crazier than us.