Provisionally "I", practically alive
mistook sign for signified,
And so since have often tried
to run'em off a cliff like Gadarene [1] swine [2]
And tied my word-ropes in anchor bends,
Wondering whether we were someone better then,
Or maybe just better able to pretend,
(and what better means to our inevitable end?)
No, I don't know if I know,
though some with certainty insist "No certainty exists!"
Well I'm certain enough of this:
in the past fourteen years there's only one girl I've kissed! [3]
In the blistering heat of the Asbury pier
we sat, quiet as monks on the Ferris wheel.
'Til looking down at the waltzer and out at the sea,
I asked her "Do you ever have that recurring fantasy
where you push little kids from the tops of the rides?"
And she shook her head "no," and I said "Oh...neither do I." [4]
Then with my Grandma's ring, I went down on one knee,
And the subsequent catastrophe has since haunted me
like a fiberglass ghost in the attic of my inconveniently selective memory.

As provisionally "you" mercifully withdrew
all the bearing points we thought we knew,
days run, days set clock, our comet shot.
We sailed waywardly on,
singing our midnight archer songs
until well past dawn.
It's still dark on the deck of our boat, haphazardly blown,
broken bows, our aimless arrow words don't mean a thing.
So by now I think it's pretty obvious that there's no God --
and there's definitely a God!

I dreamt on the rocks at the Asbury dunes
that you jumped from the top of the log flume
And they gather like wolves on the boardwalk below
They're howling for answers no wolf can know!
I charged at the waves with a glass in my hand
I was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand
And I landed besides your remains on the stones
where your cold finger wrapped round my ankle bones.
Maybe ten feet away was a star, thousands of times the size of our Sun
Exploding like carnie balloons you can throw darts at.

Slept until our chest was full [5]
of yarn we spun from Shetland wool.
Socks from where the Dorset grows
sheared and scoured hours before the rooster crows.

The price of German silver [6] fell,
and threw disused thalers down the superstition well.