YouLoveMe

I recall my mother and father well, Fairly often I'll dream of one of them, But dialogue with them it does not gel, P'raps cuz there's little in them I condemn. With my spouse and my lost lover I talk, There are imagined di'logues that flow free, Pain and rep'ration we 'spress while we walk, On fantasy trails that lead to the sea. We want our children to remember us, Not to disappear below the water, So do we need to raise a troubling fuss, To live inside a son or a daughter? I'm happy I love my parents truly, Sometimes I wish they'd been more unruly. [Part III?]

We go on Weight Watchers in the summers, To lose the pounds we gain throughout the year, We unclog ourselves, self-healing plumbers, Step on scales, dispel self-measuring fear. I say our cycles are quite rational, Eating is a complement to working, We balance dutiful and passional, Die'ting is a wise balance to twerking. You think I'm telling a just-so story, You don't think that we 'tain the golden mean, Unclogging our veins is painful, gory, Indulging and die'ting are shameful, obscene. The data support your story and mine, Debate is a banquet on which we dine. [Part IV]

In America who would Li Bai be, A homeless person, always traveling, I saw you last on the upper Yangtze, You loved me for my mind unraveling. I drink my three hundred ounces a day, Write my poems on the train from Hoboken, I saw you last on the Champs-Elysees, You mocked my bad French, my heart's still broken. On my down days I want to ride and move, Forget what it is I'm supposed to do, Be a wheel with an ever-rolling groove, Be a rail with nothing ever to prove. Li Bai had beautiful calligraphy, We both had beasts inside too big to free. [Part III--Art/Lit]