By mojave (mojave7299@yahoo.com)
Date: 22 March 2000

If I Could Meet You Tonight in Vegas

If I could meet you tonight in Vegas,
I'd hold you until the past was forgotten
and all our pain made absurd--
until everything seemed worth it after all.

I'd show you my favorite places
and we'd drink margaritas with salt
and each tell our stories
about this desert place

with no memory.
I'd forget completely
what I cared about before you.
I'd take you to the intersection

where Tupac was shot--
where I sat drinking a Gatorade
one week earlier
at the same time,

having just lost my last ten dollars
at video poker
in the 7-11 on the corner.
I'd tell you how the desert tricks you,

how it is stealing the life from us even as
we stand there
never so alive.
I'd tell you everything I couldn't tell you

before, and what I should have said--
how perfect you are
in your imperfection...
And we'd weep once for our sins

and then never again.
But we are not there yet;
we are somewhere else, in some other
desert harder to define

but just as deadly,
where doubt comes too easy
and the impulse is to just disappear
like a highway mirage as you approach it.

(The vanishing is easy;
but I could not forget you
even if
I tried.)

So understand this:
I may not have been in love enough times
to be cynical about it,
and I may sound to you like the poet

that I am
(and yes,
a romantic too)--
but this does not mean

that I won't fight like bloody hell for you.