It Doesn’t Go Down Like That

for Paula Eisen

Forget Kelly mourning Caron;
you knew An American in Paris, after
a 17-minute dream-dance sequence,
would have a happy ending.

And later for those Bennett’s
left-my-heart-wherever songs,
whose Side B, as you’d guess,
always has a love-at-first-sight tune.

Give me something real:
the sad-faced sweet sixteen
no one asks to dance,
wishing she’d never thrown this party,

the wallflower across the dance floor,
painfully picking his pimples,
wanting nothing more than to take her
in his scrawny arms

if he only knew the moves,
if she would only beckon,
but we all know real life never works out
that way, the greatest words never said.

The dominant minority among us
are loners, losers, longing for love
not knowing how to go and get it
even when it’s right before their eyes,

yet fast-forward five years, when locked
in an air-tight kiss we also knew would come,
dazed, they won’t recall what got them there—
a Hollywood ending we expected all along.

Three Principles of Dialectical Thinking

for Kaiping Peng

1. Contradiction

How the branch yin here
and the leaf yang there
keep the tree a tree
in their own inevitable way
yet remain the tree
is how they live
with the other
but for themselves.

2. Change

The roots emerge
along the lawn
like horizontal trunks—
but oh, the work
they do below the surface!
It is not a failure in truth
but in human language
for them to say they go
this way when they go that.

3. Holism

Sun feeds sky,
sky grows tree,
woodpecker digs into tree,
sparrow fills hole with twigs,
raven pulls out nest straw by straw,
gardener rakes detritus,
squirrel forages in pile,
pile decay fertilizes soil,
seed sprouts from Earth,
relationships resolving all
of Nature’s pandemonium.

Philip Vassallo has written two poetry collections: Like the Day I Was Born and American Haiku; two essay collections: Person to Person and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze; three drama collections A Case-by-Case Basis, Questions Asked of Dying Dreams, and Hurry Hurry: Dramatic and Comedic Sketches; and three books on work-related writing: The Art of On-the-Job Writing, The Art of Email Writing, and How to Write Fast Under Pressure. He received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, and 30 of his licensed plays have been produced throughout North America.