ANDREW: I cannot talk to girls
'cause each of them is a world
a life to live,
possible horizon.

I could be your paramour, or
I could be family rising.
Every kiss every touch costs
other lips, other loves.

Blessed is he, full of hope
who gives up space, gives up roads
for walls and doors, blood and bones, he
has a home, and his home is called Rising.

What of us, looking up, who
see the stars, every one, as
destinies we could choose, but
choice is death,
so we end up choosing nothing at all?

REASON: Woah,
stop the press,
I love you
but you talk too much.
Think about your neighbors
they've got work in the morning
and they've probably had enough
of your all-containing sigh:
"Oh me, oh my, oh why!"
Just pick a life and die.

ANDREW: Oh take the keys,
Sweet Reason, leave,
for the festering forest of other living things
is an oxygen-thief, I cannot breathe
nor tax photosynthesis. Oh God
are you still into us?
I wouldn't be.
Having fathered-forth a universe of possibilities
and palm-trees to have to see
the weight with which we worship
our college degrees.
"You can be what you wanna be!"
screamed the cartoon I saw when I was three.
It's made a cartoon out of me:
Watch me panic over reruns.

If I could approximate to manliness
at least to the degree with which my forefathers imagined it
I would kiss the blistered feet the lips of every inhabitant
of Rust Belt Ohio and like an emergency baptism
I'd sprint to every accident: I the Junior Jesuit
you the Bitter Landscape
in the flavor of the Sacrament,
but oh God the sacrilege
to posture as an offered gift
to call my all what worldly wits insist is split in fourths and fifths.
They don't teach you this in high-school.

REASON: Woah, squeeze my hand and show me
how much it hurts.
Still, I don't think your problems are cosmic
or God-sent.
Have you eaten lunch yet?
It helps.
I'll love you till you die.
I don't care if you don't find
this thing they call a life.