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I Google you to see if you are still there
after seven years.
Is there eternal life among the electrons?
It seems there are fewer hits now,
but I could be wrong.

There are more oddities intermixed:
a list of runners from a race -
two of whom, when combined together,
share your first and last name.
Apparently you are also a camera brand,
and you must have a distant relation
who runs a knitting group in Iowa.

These all appear
like random thoughts
that intrude when I try to hold your face,
your voice
in my mind.

I bring up Mapquest
and click for directions.
In "Starting Location"
I type "Wishing You Were Here"
and in ending location,
I enter, "Heaven."
I click on "Get Directions"
and wait.

My Piano

You've had a day like this,
and so you know what I mean
when I say that

I wish I had a piano.

I wish I could pull the little stool out
and settle in, savor
that moment as my hands hang
over the keys - just before notes arise
to do my bidding
like 88 genies unleashed from ivory bottles.

I wouldn't wish for anything more
than well-made scales and
disciplined arpeggios.

Okay - I'm lying -

I'd love something baroque
to lift me - and my piano -
up like a magic carpet
high above the suburban sprawl,
traffic,
alarm clocks,
and daytime talk show hosts.

Somewhere up there among the stars
I'd play to the accompaniment
of Holst's "Planets",
and dispute Copernicus's findings
about the revolution of the Earth.

Soon the entire cosmos
would align itself around
our song,
correcting the error
of its previously incomprehensible ways.

Dream Lovers

1.

I bowl on Thursday nights
with my wife’s scorned lover
whom she left me for -
a cruel laugh and,
"Life's too short
to keep having sex with just you."

He found out life was too short
to have sex with just him, too.

We bowl with all the other
broken hearts,
new ones always arriving, stunned
in her wake.
They have made me
team captain
because I was the first.

I have a blue satin shirt
with, "Captain" embroidered on the back.

I am proud of how it shimmers
when they shine the lights on the disco ball.

2.

Then there is the secret
dream lover I had before
I was married.

It was just a one night fling,
but she returns now and then
to fill me in on her progress.

She doesn't threaten
to reveal our secret -
it's become something
of a sacred bond between us.

"You were mine, first,"
she reminds me.

But she is also married now.
To a dwarf.
She met him at her
disabled persons activist group
after she lost the use of her
legs in an agricultural accident
in Manhattan.

We sit in a dream cafe
drinking over-priced coffee
and show each other pictures
of our dream children.

"It's a life," she says
before she becomes a crow
and flap-flops away -
no need for legs.