Kate at Midnight

Kate at midnight: a pain in my ass.
My confusion: our words of glass
silvered with streaks of moony scrape,
crack-smoke delusion; "I miss you"
texted like ticker-tape; "I'm lying"
phrases; innuendos, burned from Kate.
Dead mufflers line our Interstate.
Clouds are clueless metaphors, and
there is an oyster-pearl in silence:
we are at war. To quip is coitus:
I fuck her out of low-rent shyness,
in a dream-bed sodden with seaweed,
as though the Schuylkill spoke like
the Pacific, its surface silver spikes.

I always wait for Kate's next move,
& when it's finished I can light a
cigarette, stare off into space, peer
into the windows of distant buildings,
holding offices which probably have swivel
chairs, people who know more about
money than we do, but stay too busy
to do what we do, which is each other
on the phone, oh baby oh yes, jacked/
inbox full of what we jerk from text-
scapes, digital kisses— as we take our sex
to climax, what's seeded into Kate, next
to knowing her own tidal pull, is how we
move the Earth to make pearls of nothingness—