Explaining Summer

On the first day of existence,
the sun chose us. And that was that.

He’s got a street address now
and a delinquent tax record.

Let me explain. I am lying to you
because it is cold where you are.

Cold and far and snow and darkness
and chilly hands. Or maybe not.

But such dichotomies are easier.
And who are you to stop living

multiple lives and occupations
in the snowstorms of my mind?

Teacher and farmer and secret poet.
I need to tell you I don’t love you.

I just need to stop falling in love
with you each time a cool breeze

rushes past the tips of my fingers.
Or revising another novel I will shred

in the hidden office behind my rib cage.
As if my entire body were a mob front.

But isn’t everything a front for something?
How, in my world, cold weather is nothing.

Only a history of you. Remember that talk?
The gulls? The Baskin Robbins in winter?

I said: Anger is almost always shame
in an existential crisis, writing poetry

in a café, shielding its notebook
from each passing stranger.

Oh, I might as well be talking to myself.
Besides, I theorize that you

will only read this in one of a thousand
possible universes. If not here, there.

Or in the warmth of my skull. Imagine that:
One goddamn poem for each world

in which our lives intersected.
Like hairs tangled in sunlight.

What’s not to like? What person
would say no to zipping from body

to body on some madman experiment,
taking notes on the many cuisines

of love, giving each of them names
like they were your children.

“Instead of love, why not sky?
A species of bird? Or the changing

climate of the heart?” I give up.
I am thinking of names now

as a breeze passes and I do not love you.
I am merely enjoying the cold

in the national park of myself.
As if the origin story of something

entirely unimportant were about to begin.
A new sub-breed of sparrows.

An alternative to happiness.
Curtains raising to a new color of sky.

by Gian Lao