For Our Two Selves Beyond the Seven Clouds of Truth

You're here again 

You and your delightfully perverse 
Wickedly tender wit 

Here you are as always 
Disinclined to offer facile disquisitions

Merely as a pleasant means to look away 

A suicide for instance

Feels utterly saintly 
Everywhere tonight

Feels difficult to be 

Let’s just be here 

Calling things and events by their true names 

For once beyond bitterness and fatigue 

O how this honesty becomes us opening outward 

To reveal persons 
Other than ourselves 

Such absolute values 

So vaguely obsolete 

So happily prone to be misread 

These few words 
Tender only the flimsiest aid to being 

Here at the climax 

The more naked we get 

The more clearly we'll be seen

To be ourselves 

Why should we be ashamed? 

The French aren’t ashamed of being French

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