If I'd had your number

if i'd had your number


if i'd had your number i would have
called, even from that far place, in that strange
land where everything grows freely

just to say, "are you beneath the very same
moon? is your extra pillow fluffed and empty?
has your little dog even noticed i'm no longer

robbing her of the only friend she has?"
last night, in a bar where i couldn't understand
my own language, for one moment, i wished

you were holding my hand, snaking through
that crowded cavern, so thick with human
humidity, so close and fertile i felt i could

smell everyone's breakfast seeping-out
of them, smell the sweet lies which pass
between men and women caught-up

in the dense rituals of pickups and refusals,
overtones and long, lustful glances across
a wormy midnight room of writhing bodies

oblivious to conventions of propriety
and fear, covered over, fully, by the thick warm
sea of man's carnal longing and its gap-toothed

sister between a woman's legs, breathing
and aching for the pulse which passeth all
understanding; i caught myself returning

from loss-in-thought, and looked back to see
just where, along the way, in this sea you let
my hand go, and where, in this sea, you were

floating now; in that strange place, i shuffled through
my feelings, like a tongue unable to find
a missing tooth, probing the place where you had been.