I tell my friend Jude
about the phenomenologist I’m dating:

	We were doing poppers in Texas
	in his living room & on our knees
	having sex—I turned around to look
	just before the big O & saw him
	chewing the wooden arm 
	of the easy chair.


And then you broke up with him?

	No. I didn’t get the message.

I tell her how he talks phenomenology to me:
how consciousness is everything, how important it is 
to suspend assertions of existence independent of consciousness, 
which I take to mean, he’s afraid of living.

Jude says:
	the bottom line is he’s chewing 
	on the chair. What are you gonna do?


I tell her how, in Pittsburgh, he tried 
to teach me how to drive my own car.
How I said to him: if this car crashed in a forest,
		               you couldn’t hear it, but I would.


So that was it?

	Yeah, that was it.

Listen to a reading of the poem.