Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063        

Doubt Us With Or Without You

It is strange to see the river through my window
because there is no river outside, there is nothing but the street below.

I do not live on the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Williamsburg Bridge, or any bridge
for that matter.  Nor do I live in Portland, Chicago, or Buffalo, but I’ve friends in Cambridge.

All places are not the same, but they may as well be, for those who are never home
or never where they want to be.  You are always the same place, the same interior inside the same chrome.

What else is not outside is also what is not inside, unless “it” is,
meaning that “it” is my bed or books, or Flowers, or my Gap jeans or copy of Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

It is not a matter of light, we’ve been over this, or we haven’t, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about lights.
It is 2:37 am, and it might be about sleeping, with myself or someone else, not wrong or right

because it’s not about dichotomies or doppelgangers, but about the finite and infinity.  It’s not about love,
but maybe about not trusting love, no that’s too narrow, let’s leave out love.  Yes, give it a shove

out of the window, the one with the river below(?)  Now “it” is not love, because love is out.
With that thrust, love may find trust, or have a chance.  Is it possible for us to stay us, washed away in rivers of doubt?

Previous Poem: In This City, The Stars Of The Stars