Décollage

My boyfriend ended up
In the psych ward
He was kind of my boyfriend
Though he lived with another guy

They owned a house
Together
And they still had sex
From time to time

They hunted down each other
When one of them fell off the grid
Which my boyfriend
Often did

Like he did with me
When I was twenty-two

I brought him back to life
He had been suffocating
Trying to write a screenplay
Adaptation
Of a children's book
That his agent had arranged
With the guy he lived with
His so-called writing partner

Their first screenplay
Had set off a bidding war
Everyone wanting to meet them
But that was three years before

Now they missed deadlines
As writing sessions digressed
Into videotaping themselves
Having robotic, headless sex
That he later played for me
On their big screen TV

My boyfriend went mad
When he smoked reefer
So we settled on ecstasy instead
Writhing on each other's bodies
Eyes rolling
To the backs of our heads

Orgiastic rave music playing in the background
In the one-bedroom apartment he had rented
Away from his-whatever he was
Writing partner
Caretaker
Jailer
Away from the deadlines
And dead ends

His mother's new husband
And her old one
His father
And his shotgun
And on and on

He clung to me
On our doses of ecstasy
Whispering my name
Over and over
In my ear

And I told him
Let's just cut up pieces of coloured paper
And glue them into
Something new
Cuz that's all we gotta do
Decoupage
And décollage
Not all this bullshit
Mortgages and Hollywood and success
Oh let's just make a mess
Yeah, let's just make a mess

But, like I said
My boyfriend ended up in the psych ward
Where the visiting hours were very few
So I wasn't sure what I should do

We'd been doing so much together
And having lots of sex
All the time and wherever
So I met other people
And I tried to say high all the time

And I drew lots of pictures
Of bleeding infants
And pieces of shit under people's noses
And houses being swallowed up by waves
And dots, lots of coloured dots
So many dots
Pages and pages of dots
Swirling, whirling, random dots everywhere

I thought maybe being in the psych ward
For a couple weeks
Would open my boyfriend's eyes
He'd turn a corner
Disconnect
Sell the house
Do or be
Someone else
Not feel so envious
Of my adventurousness
My willingness
To commit one hundred percent
Maybe he wouldn't be tempted
To try to strangle me again
Trying to prove
That it wasn't so easy
That sometimes we can't respond
We can only react
And I did
So he finally let go
Of my throat

I told him
When I visited
That he could call me
When he was going to be released
I'd come and get him
But he said he wasn't sure
He wasn't sure of anything

He'd have to let me know
He never did
Or he only did after he'd done what he did
And went back to the other guy
Went back to trying to finish the uninspiring screenplay
To trying to keep up with the mortgage payment schedule
Went back to waiting to see
If their first script, which had been optioned,
Would ever go into production

I found god or something
The AA meetings he'd had
A drawer full of 30-day chips from
I got 60, and then 90, 6 months, a year
We kept in touch from time to time
On the telephone
He didn't finish the script
Defaulted on the loan
Got deeply interested in Jungian archetypes
The anima and animus
The search for his Double
With his therapist
With whom he'd become very close
And then
Then
His phone number went dead