jackinthebox[1]*

Sometimes I need to take my brain off the record player & listen to it skip because every now & then

You pop up you jackinthebox with a trombone

It would be nice if a little jazz every now & then

Could cure this internal beatbox but it’s more than your things I miss it’s the smell of your deodorant on your neck & that pause between conversations when we’ve talked ourselves into the record player it’s right then that you are intimately in you and

I am intimately in me every now & then

Your face gives me pause because it carries more than dimples & glasses they have always shone back other countries & other languages & other everythings where you & I could go together

I’d like to love you the way Frank loves Vincent but I was always more an impressionist than an abstract & the impression of your jackinthebox on the sill

Makes me dizzy sometimes & sometimes that pause

Returns to the back of my neck & you’ve arrived

In time to slow my brain down to a crawl.

---

[1] After Frank O’Hara’s “Poem: Ά la recherché d’Gertrude Stein”

* published in Catalyst, spring 2006