Cut 'Em Off

Do you remember the morning before graduation?
The sun and the birds were just
Beginning their assault on your room,
And suddenly! a series of reports:
Drunken assholes, setting off fireworks
At five o’clock on a Thursday morning.
You, naturally, rose,
Threw back the old bedsheet you used as a curtain
And bellowed that you’d
"Come down there and cut ‘em off!"

My goodness, how I loved you then!
Laughing, both of us nude and stinking –
I of love, you of me –
Our aching heads,
Our mouths like ashtrays.

Neither of us could get back to sleep.
I padded bare-assed to the kitchen
And ran the water some minutes to the proper frigidity,
And you drank both glasses in hungry hungover gulps
And asked me to get you some more.

In my better mind, I look at your closed eyes,
Your ravaged toenails ranged like a mummy’s at the foot of the bed,
I look at the crown of your balding head (the same pate
I had grasped in all manners of passion),
And walk out the door without a kiss or backwards glance.

But that morning, it was all I could do to pour you another glass
And get back into bed laughing, while the room got warmer
And the fireworks sounded outside your window.