It Was a Good Life and It Was Ours

(About a 2 minute read)

“She wore her smile like lingerie” — Atticus

She wore her lingerie like a smile
From the Great Slut-Goddess of Love.
“You make me happy”, she said,
“But I wanted a pony.
Do you have a cigarette, and an inclination
To pass the time of day tangoing?”

We tangoed down to the river nude
And sat on the bank
With no more than a blanket
Between our skin and the stars.

My nose grew cold in the chill of the night.
So I politely excused myself
And plunged my face into her cleavage.
I was all about pragmatic solutions
To common, everyday problems
Back in those days.

We made love like precocious children
World-building an alternative reality.
With plenty of false starts and deletes
We swerved and lurched out way
Towards a soul-consuming mutual orgasm.

I discovered her erogenous zones
Were to the sides of her big toes,
And spent nearly half an hour
Ardently tonguing her there —
Just to increase her afterglow.

The babies never came
Due to her deployment of a hand-made IUD
In the style of a dream-catcher.
But she and I would sit outside
The coffee shop each evening
Determined to look native
For the tourist cameras.

I would chant to her my poems
As the sun surrendered the sky
And the moon rose like a pale leaf
Pressed into an infinite dark.

We encouraged each other to be authentic,
True to ourselves and not the man,
And we took that to mean
We could eat pancakes with blueberries
For supper, and sing odes
To the thighs of celebrities.

It was a good life
And it was ours.