Soapbox Moments

“Lift your head and look out the window
Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go
Listen! The birds sing! Listen! The bells ring!
All the living are dead, and the dead are all living
The war is over and we are beginning...”

-Stars, “In Our Bedroom After the War”

When you accused Sea World of losing its integrity,
I laughed into your ear, soft and low and too long like
A widow-that-could-have-been on the morning after the war.

I think you thought I was mocking you, but I mostly wasn’t.
I don’t think you know how much I like to watch you live,
your life laid out before you like a minefield

that you run through day after day, laughing as the earth
shudders and erupts behind you, maybe hoping for the one
that takes pity on you and gives you sleep. It’s the way

you watch movies like each impending scene might
open its mouth and swallow you whole, as if the world
might finally make sense looking out from the depths of its belly.

I delight in the silly, girlish things that excite you, and I hang
on every note of the symphony you may or may not be
trying to conduct with your flourishing hands. I can hear it

when you whisper in my ear, soft and low, saying something
about phony magicians and delicately carved salt-shakers.
They are words that keep my heart doing its thankless work,

knowing that someone still cares about the simple,
majestic arc of a breeching whale.

I knew a boy once, whom I thought dead,
who used to pick onion grass and play roller hockey
and feed ants to antlions. Imagine my surprise when
later that afternoon I spied you dancing with him,
outside your bedroom window.