Loose Ends

There's a moment in our memories and there we are -- laughing,

Acknowledging the frayed wire and an unforeseen spark suddenly --

We wonder: what else might we be?

No impediments to doing what we please, so we proceed --

still, all the while, laughing.

Each misguided action is a microcosm of the lingering macro-truth that we were not meant to be this way.

Still: we laugh, for a burst, in the face of convention.

Why him with her, and she with he? It's stupefying and it lives only on borrowed time.

We spend nine months drunk from an ill-conceived concoction --

our togetherness -- and then, baggy-eyed and breathless in a diner in the morning,

we see each other for what we've always been --

simply friends --

but the laughter remains, a totem of the time before we tied up loose ends.