super flower blood moon

Nick insists it’s arrogant for the poets to call the moon our wife.
Still, we pour a toast on Stacey’s balcony. Scrumpy shandies for the super flower blood moon
looming in her roseate enormity. Our mutual modest bride, shyly sober, slips
her cheek behind a veil of clouds – her singular celestial liberty
unassailable by any yabbering polycule of girls or gays or guys – 
while her doting lunatics raise our karaoke falsettos, a choir of moonstruck kettles boiling.

Suddenly somehow it is the new Laureate’s birthday, another year brought to boil,
evaporating. Beleaguered bartenders shake us bottomless negroni sbagliato…. wiv
prosecco in it…… as the night escalates through a medley of orgiastic
pop – greatest hits in the mixtape of Chris. The entire dancefloor moons
in tune, or thrashes like strung-out starlets as though a poet isn’t the mildest kind of libertine,
our office jobs skulking on Monday’s horizon. Ashleigh and Rose are dancing in their slips,

wild abandon in spaghetti straps. We hold each other close and stagger home alone. I slip
into a doze that churns me like delicates threshed in a washing machine. Set the shower boiling,
forehead pressed to moldy silicone seams. Recite the litany of stupid drinks that felt like liberty
last night. Marriages howled at the moon when I’m sure I personally cannot be a wife.
Look at me – I can barely offer my body to the sea, seeking a saltwater cure as the bluish moon
glares down on Sunday morning. Jellyfish tremble around the pontoon, crescent organs

pumping blithely through the brine and its pollutants – drifts of milt and excrement, an orgy
of bodily fluids. Already the new teens cluster to my raft, chittering like dolphins, slippery
with sunscreen while solar rays pang my headache transcendental. I try to fish for moon-jellies
but they bob from my cupped hands. The real moon ripens like the world’s most squeezable boil
and I pinch her white head in my fingers. Cringe at last night’s slapstick affectations; my wiiiife.
Is the only true thing I can cling to my own shame? But I need to seize my silly liberties…

Like when I went to that young professionals’ event which turned out to be full of libertarians,
inebriated think-tank interns networking their way doggedly towards an orgy – 
a vibe I should’ve grasped when someone groped my hair and dismissed a caller IDed ‘Wifey’
before we trailed from last drinks to the third location… from whence I slipped
still blessedly fully dressed, then nonetheless lurched homeward shirtless after vomit boiled
buoyantly into the gutter, all down my rayon smock, drenched in the bilious moonlight.

My lover laughed about it later. What else could he do? I was walked home by only the moon
safely, at least, and with new comedies to proclaim. I suspect I am ultimately less liberated
than I’d like to think, watching the youths draped over one another on the raft. The ocean boils
where I dive, foam caressing my limbs. It’s better not to picture who’s really having all the orgies,
or spot them in the kitchenette at your new office. It’s best to be touched hands-free by the slip
of the sea, who’s actually wedded to the moon; their steadfast rings of orbit and tide, gravity-wives 

circling our boiling core with spousal vows. Next drinks I must report this to the poets: liberate
us from slipping up over a married goddess. We offer nothing the moon might want, even orgies.
But what other brightness could we thrash our bodies against? The moon rises. We cry my wife! 
                                                                   That’s my wife! And then she turns her face away from us.