preferring form to truth

My x-girl, with her hair getting twenty hours

of unstoppable volume and her face getting

the deepest-feeling clean available, just got

her PhD from Berkeley last month and now

she’s driving a cab.

Her pops had to file

bankruptcy as a result of sending the

apple-of-his-astigmatic-eye through eight years

of “I’m not really sure what I wanna do.”

Her moms said, “Well, she obviously lives in a

post love-in, post be-in kind of world.”

I hear she’s been going to clubs and getting

trashed a lot lately.

“I’m a fatalist,” she once told me.  “Most Irish

Catholics are like this.  You play the hand you’re

given and you do the best you can.  If you’re always

worried about, what if this happens, what if that

happens, then you miss the joy of life.”

That was the night I lost it and spilled Jack Daniels

all over her trendy V-neck blouse and set fire to it and

flung it out the window.

“What in f**k’s name were you thinking,” she kept

yelling over and over.  Then she threw a frozen pork chop

at me and knocked out two of my teeth, took my last Michelob,

flipped me off, and flagged a cab.

I didn’t call her for two weeks.

When I attempted to extend the olive branch, I approached

her front door with a dozen red roses and an apology.

She wouldn’t answer the door, even though I knew she was there.

At least her Acura was there and her cockapoo was cowering in

her doghouse and I could hear her stereo blasting Alanis Morissette.