Death of the Poet

You said you'd done 200 push ups, and then
we looked at each other.
I said: "Your arms look like it."
You said: "Do they?"
Then we said nothing for a while.
I thought you were comfortable with silences.
Then I realized that you didn't have
anything to say.

If I have to write one more poem about the distance
between you and me
--the singular me and the royal you--
then I'm going to die a slow,
mournful, ugly, selfish death,
writhing in cowardly pitifulness,
like something out of a Paul Verhoeven
movie, but not the popular ones.
The ones they don't show anywhere at midnight.