Let's be a Team

You can be the brains and I can be the brains.
You can be the brawn and I can be the brawn.
You can be the boss and I can be your dame.

Let's be pool sharks together. Let's hang out in pools
that do not belong to us. Let’s swim around with
cardboard fins and neon floaty wings. When they tell us
it's private property, let's chomp our teeth at them and then sing
I’m in the mood for love/simply because you’re near me.

Let’s give the world some absurdity to jot in their diaries.

Let's ride down Main Street on rusty bikes. I will be a
suffragette in bloomers and a Sunday bonnet. You will have
a monocle and a moustache. Let’s emancipate me, baby.
You like your woman emancipated, don’t you baby.
Let’s yell it into megaphones one front porch to the next:

THE WORLD IS ABSURD.

Let’s not stop there. Let’s put on our Bonnie and Clyde
costumes. Let’s fill our arms with lies like baby chickens
hatched and counted. Let’s sell our lies to ‘em all. Let’s get
real good at card tricks.You could charm ‘em with your
smile; I could bat my eyelashes.

Let’s pull a fast one with our arm-filled lies. But, please,
let’s give each other only truth. Tell me you can do it better
than any of the guys who tried to make a home in my no,
my stop, my wait not this and I will believe you.

I’ll believe you, baby. For real this time.   
The world is incurably absurd.  

You’ll get some buddies to join Hell’s Angles—
the mathematically inclined biker gang of your brilliant
imagination—and I'll be your ol’ lady with my hair twisted up
in curlers at night. You’ll still think I’m bangable. Let’s wear leather
jackets so tourists will take black and white pictures of us,
me in my red lipstick and you in your white tee and blue jeans.

Let’s ball that absurdity up into something beautiful;
we’ve got tomorrows in spades.

But then. You’ve been doing so many math problems, angling
yourself closer to and then farther from me.
You read one out loud one night:

A beautiful woman leans against a brick wall. The angle made
by her feet and the ground is 6 degrees less than 7 times the
angle made by her body against the wall.
Will she stick around when I get too old for this?

This is when I realize that you’ve been doing all the calculating.
You have been tainting our inertia with your calculating. And then
maybe I’ll realize I’m fed up with all the calculating. I am tired of
bleaching my hair blond. And I’m tired of the cigarettes,
and the godawful diner grilled cheese sandwiches, and your
compadres banging on the door at 3 a.m. with the drunken revelation
that the answer has always been 46.

This is when I realize the world is too absurd.

This is when I say, this is my last shot of whiskey for a while.
You didn't have to make it inevitable, baby.

Let’s let several wasted years pass between that night
and the night we see each other again. Let’s let the silence
heal all wounds. I thought you wouldn’t find me in the desert,
what with all the stars so crisp out here and all. But here
you are on a white horse painted black,

absurd.

Let’s be a team, you say.
You can be the brains and I can be the brains.

Let’s talk about Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne instead
of fumbling through apologies. Let’s put on our
Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne costumes, fill our arms with
each other and dance our last years  like they’re all watching.
Like they’re all whispering in their seats, like they’re all clapping.
Like there’s gunna be a rave review in the paper tomorrow.

When we take our bow, let’s think,
all this time and it’s still better to dream with you than about you.