By Martin Bemberg

When I use it more often as a table in my lap
And less as a laptop, and am under the influence
Of things like Janis Joplin on vinyl and four dollar wine
And the kind of spliff that Sarah calls a New York Cigarette,

I say things to you like, “I like you a lot right now,”
To which you say, under the influence of time of year or month
Or whatever else,
“Why? Because I am being distant and dismissive?’

And after I have spent who knows how long
Recycling my unsmoked, ashtray butt-touchers,
In a kind of re-make, I’d say, if cigarettes were a movie,

And after I have spent who knows how long
Wondering how long the remaining flakes if any
Will survive past me, rather, how long I’ll be a smoker,
Rather how long I will live (see: 67),

And because I have spent who knows how long
Wondering why moths love four dollar wine so much,
At last I see as I hear in stereo with one violent shudder
Why guys like Alex Delarge of A Clockwork Orange
And Hitler of a Reich that worked like clockwork
Loved the German composers,

And while recalling your birth the day the Berlin Wall fell
I say, “No, because you are not mean,”
And because there is a silence I do not understand
And no possibility of typing, I put paper to pen
In hope that someday soon through some miracle without wires,
When it arrives, I’ll have sent and you’ll have read
What I have written,

And hope that you are flattered to find a poem
In which you are more important
Than the end of communism,
And more powerful than Beethoven’s ninth.

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