Five floors up on the elevator: I was too
thin, almost collapsed from humidity outside,
but Jennifer, the knowledge of her insides,
held me up, with luggage we carried through.
Why the compulsion was there, prodded us
into instant betrayal, I cannot say or know now-
clothes got piled sloppily, hotly, on a rug, brown
as always at the Atherton Hilton, clean, fussed
for breaking, entering, conventioneers, academics,
now two incredibly horny, moody adolescents.
Soon, the room was a desert island, the bed a sand-dune.
We were washed ashore after fucking, over & over.
No one in history had been so marooned with a lover.
Every time I touched her, I risked rousing a monsoon.
Wave after wave broke, entered. We didn't exist
except as pistons in a tropical engine. Glasses of water,
occasional baths, a little TV, body-boundaries slaughtered,
so that when we hit the Arts Fest, it didn't resist.
My brain had spokes spinning the wrong way, but
she took the Pandora's Box & nailed it shut.
What was backed up for her: everything, nothing.
I had no yen for anything but to survive. Nights there
were like days. We never had leave to figure out where
we were. Tunnels spiraled down & up: something
heaved, out in the world. Someone under the bed
seemed to be nudging us; maybe how we'd been
reduced to carnage. Being in her: what I was in
was sheets rumpled, no maid, dementia in the head.
We ate nothing: crackers, occasional food on College Ave.
Once I spun to McLanahan's: lines crazy, bodies mad.
An eternity later, I strode down Pine Street in Philly,
saw a blonde boy, a teenager, in a group of kids, thought
of Jen, craziness, madness, order emerging from naught.
I knew, from reading bird-signs, shadows, nothing silly.
Eternity, agony & ecstasy melded into it, life piercing
into more life, primordial ooze given sharp, tight direction,
emergence of existence, matter, leveled energy, infection
of messy something into hollow nothing- Jen's tearing
as we held each other through class-collisions, convulsions-
buses I board to move forward. All school, no expulsion.
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