Nothing compares to you—except, apparently, Season One of TrueBlood.

Usually, you’re all I can think about—
you in that picture I saw
(and can’t unsee)
with the woman who won’t even
come close to replacing me;
it is a melodramatic story,
it launches a dagger
of pain at that place where my heart
used to be, and then (thankfully)
I start thinking of
Bill and the way
he raced to Sookie
in the sunlight turning blacker
and blacker as his skin burned
stumbling like a zombie through
the cemetery;
and then there’s Sam, and I can’t
decide who I would want if it
were me—
I mean, someone already dead or someone
who couldn’t help barking in his sleep?

This is what romance has come to,
I think, all this murder and
blood-sucking, mind reading and
mildly uncomfortable eroticism
between humans and creatures who
go to bed in coffins—
but if it weren’t for HBOGO and my Roku,
I might be spending every night still
thinking about you.

“When you walked in the air went out,”
and I find myself singing along with the
theme song while the title credits roll and
I’m watching a fox decompose
interspersed with a montage of holy rollers
and strippers…
it’s gritty and disturbing and
somehow comforting to know
that there are a few small
blessings, a few escapes
where I can block out thoughts
of your various indiscretions
and lack of regard and graceless
dismount from the galloping wildness
that was my heart….

So, I am grateful for the little things:
cinematic horror, for instance,
rather than a more literal rendition—
these fleeting distractions;
transient titillation;
a good book, read while snuggled deep
into the folds of the ugliest shade of
pale-blue bathrobe, wearing pajama pants dotted
liberally with pink penguins, or maybe
a night out with poetry and laughter,
where I will come home and share
my dinner with vampires and shape shifters.