Sometimes I feel so sad, I cannot think at all.
I just space out. I can't bring myself to tell you what I mean.
How, for example, men like you are like poems.
Just when the going gets good, there's this blank space
coming up from the bottom of the page.
Makes me feel like an airplane being swallowed by a cloud.
Or maybe I'm the cloud that swallowed planes.
How many planes? I can't keep track. It's a sad story.
No one hangs around behind the Pearly Gates. Not these days.
The immortals are long gone. So whose fault is that? Mine?
You always did say I think too much, and maybe it's true.
I live in my thoughts, not the real world.
And the real world has no thoughts. And no pussy.
We're exiles then. The two of us. Or them.
That's how I picture it anyhow: the pussies and my thoughts,
or maybe it's the pussy's thoughts and me. Who can say?
Nothing follows in an unreal world
where each thought, like the moon, has no light of its own
and no independent means of transportation. Some travel by ship,
some by air. I try to make reservations in advance.
Though several never arrive. They slow to a stop
and vanish like smoke. (It's so frustrating.)
Who can prove they exist at all, and how?
What is the speed and weight of a thought or its absence?
50% chance of rain or variable cloudiness?
Where are the warning signs: Stop. Yield. Soft Shoulders Ahead.
Why are the best always hovering above me, waiting to descend
and play me like a violin or a piano, pianissimo at first,
then forte. Instead the familiar anguish arrives
and leaves without me. It always does. I can't help it.
There is no afterlife. Our time is up before I ever arrive.

Nin Andrews is the author of The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts and Why They Grow Wings. Her work has been published in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly, and many other literary journals. She is currently editing a book of translations of the French poet,
Henri Michaux.

 Nin

 Andrews