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I Had Planned to Stay

      I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do
      several million times a day. I need your disapproval,
      can’t live without your churlish ways.
                               —John Ashbery (from ”Homecoming”)

I like that I’m not like this. I could add some winks
or a few hahas. But isn’t it true?

Who or what do I think of several million times a day.
They say my mind is faster than most (this as a way to
describe a malady, pressured speech), so perhaps there
are things I think of several million times a day. But are

they you? Or this or that or you? I dare not say. When
what I meant to say was a dare say not. Either way,
what of it? You mean the world to me. Just as you
(way over who knows where) used to. So what would
be weird about that?

I’ve been watching this show which is fictional. It’s about
a group’s chosen friends. How they choose to live in the
same gigantic house. Or is it a hotel? Either way, it’s a
choice they each make, as they each live in this house
or hotel.

There was a little boy who liked so little about the place
in which he was lucky to be born and exist. And in which he 

grew up and up and, well, left. How does one like and yet
not like a family? Perhaps he simply did not like them.
This story, while getting older, is too fresh to know.

And once a man he went about the task of building.
Unlike his father before him, he was not a builder of
furniture, not a painter of houses, not a person who
laid down any law, or saw to it that they were upheld.

Instead, he slowly—and I mean ever so slowly—gathered
people. His people. They were not to live under the same
roof, no. But they were often there, under the same roof
as he.  And this satisfied the man to no end.