Cars Passing By, With and Without Prescription
by jimmy-king
Part One
We sat on a strange wooden platform
Which hung suspended
From a strange metal structure.
And we kissed in the daylight
With cars passing by.
It struck me then
That I hadn’t kissed anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
In over two years.
And I’d never before
Kissed anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
Who identifies as a Marxist.
Or who loves Virginia Woolf.
Or who takes her sandals off to splash in muddy water without prompting and
Without even rolling up her jeans.
Or whose love of life captures her in the same contradictions as mine.
And I haven’t written a love poem
For someone who might also be writing me love poems
In over two years
But this is it.
Here it is.
This is it,
Here it is,
In four days
We will live in separate cities
And then I might not kiss anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
For two more years
Or two more after that but
Such a possibility strikes me as unlikely.
Not because we can commute but because you showed me
As we hung suspended on a strange wooden platform
Kissing in the daylight
With cars passing by
(As we braved the mosquito bites in that field that night;
As we waded through the creek today
While thunder cracked all around us
And rain poured down right upon us)
That I am someone who someone worth loving
Can find worth loving.
Part Two
Or hang on.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
It doesn’t have to be like kale soup,
Which has been connoted for me as representing the preservation of tradition and community while effecting radical change within the food system.
It can instead be like artichokes
Which I just like
For no fucking reason
Other than that they’re good.
We each got over 40 mosquito bites because,
While we lay in a field under the, like, five stars that decided to show themselves at the peak of the Perseides meteor shower,
We were too busy making out to give a shit.
And it was fun.
It was fun, and tonight when we got dinner and you asked me to explain why I liked artichokes so much
We abandoned our tradition of narrative, us English majors, and we decided to study Sociology,
Because sometimes it’s better to look at how things are
Before you even ask yourself why.