Botanical Gardens

(for Dawn S.)

I’m in a tree maze searching for a minotaur.
I’m eating a bowl of cereal pretending I’m not lactose intolerant.
I’m thinking of you thinking of me as we both pretend otherwise.

I want you.
I want you so bad.
I want to marry you and have broken children with you.

We are film noir.
We are the dingy undigested streets of Los Angeles.
We are Betty and Veronica.

I am trying desperately to make friends with a mind I have ignored since before I was a tadpole or baby cookie monster.
I am trying unsuccessfully to get you to return to a farm neither one of us seems to believe in any longer.
I know my intellect both electrifies and scares you to death and that eating in some greasy spoon with you was just the tip of a very intimate but freezing cold ice-cube.

I need to be Winslet to your DiCaprio, Hepburn to your Tracy, Eve to your Adam.
I need to stop clinging to that which does not cling back and try once and for all to be more than just somebody else’s spilled milk.
Watching movies with you was like attending Church except no one judged you and the sermons actually made sense.

Touch of Evil is playing in my head except in this version Charlton Heston’s part is played by an actual Mexican.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch Chimes At Midnight without falling asleep.
I wonder who your Rosebud is and if like me you weren’t too terribly impressed with Citizen Kane but loved The Magnificent Ambersons.

You are like an open book written in some foreign language.
You are like a distant memory incapable of closure or recompense.
You are my Scopes Trial and I refuse to be anyone else’s monkey but yours.

Charles Eric Cicirella
November 15, 2009