COMMUNION
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
1. Commuting is a daily mass: we enter, we pay, we pray to get home faster 2. Your romance has finished, despite its lingerings That’s why you grasp at dreams after alarm clock reminders Coffee and communion, morning traffic Pick-me-up to put-me-down Longing for love is logical, you decide Only when passing the Durex billboard on Slauson Doodles remain daydreams Crude vestiges, “once upons” You’ll flip over when the boss walks by But you don’t erase them 3. Then it's five. Dreaming again Of the bed you came from, hoping the lingerings will —but they don’t An air bag alerts you to the fact that you’ve crashed. A fender-bender beneath a condom ad How romantic is that?
Thank you for reading the Poem of the Week! If you can feel the love, then spread the love some more.
Continuing along with the theme of love from last week’s pre-Valentine’s Day poem, this week’s poem is a post-love collision. This isn’t a poem about heartbreak so much as it is a poem about when reality returns after the honeymoon.
Dreaming, commuting, communing, loving, crashing—I find similar emotions among all of these routine aspects of life. The lingerings of love last longer than we may like, and my mind wanders in traffic. Wanting more from life, or wanting to be certain of where you are going, is consuming. It pervades all aspects of life. The mess of dreams and the chaos of traffic leave me grasping for a reason why. Religion offers solace to some, but I’ve always felt it to be as transactional as casually dating: I only have time for it on the weekend.
“Communion” was initially two separate poems (one about traffic and the other about love), but I married them here when I dwelled on how they are connected. What starts as a dreamed truth can get twisted into overly complicated logic so that dream and reality blur. I spend a lot of my time overthinking, and I think this poem shows some of those thought processes.
To be honest with you, I don’t love this poem, but it takes me back to a familiar time and place while evoking feelings I still have. Maybe there’s something to that—love can be as simple as commuting the same route every day, so long as you have the patience for it. But take my musings on love with a grain of salt; I spent Valentine’s Day’s evening playing Fortnite.
Honk, Ricky