Antiepithalamium I

By John Tottenham

At last, their smugness is united:
their compatible vacuity,
their insufferable beaming.
They were meant for each other,
to the exclusion
of all other possibilities,
all other meaning.

A woman with a past meets a man
with no future.
He exchanges his celibatarian pallor
for her placid beige face,
upon which tremulously reigns
expectation of adoration
and relief from the responsibilities
of a life without boundaries.
All in the name of love,
as if it were some moral drug,
something definite
to agonize about.
A thankless task:
this radiance …
in which you bask.

This is exactly what we always craved:
permission to collapse
into pointless struggle,
to plunge greedily
into the possessive pronoun.
To speak,
as we have always wanted to speak:
in the first-person plural.

You pined for suffocation, freedom
to immerse yourself
until all else faded
into indifference.
For too long you were the center
of nobody’s universe.
Now you are my doorknob,
you are my earthworm, you are my lover.
A bleeding heart on a stick:
caring more about “us” than anyone else
or each other.

This article was originally published in Slake No. 3 To read all of the stories from that issue, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.