Tubas Need Oxygen: Ode to A Friend

The fact of our friendship is that

My love is so elephantine, I love you like a tuba is completed by oxygen.

The collision and rushing byzantine mechanical connection, capping, making

Something out of the pause-less swell-and-shrink of living so that

The brassy and absurd inter-bending slopes of my persona can meet oxygen (that is,

Your quiet potential-ful necessary-ness),

My friend,

And again! From the top!

Oxygen can only be completed when love, like mine, is so elephantine

A little big and a little aware of it, plucking you for a second from the hot

Swirl-swell of lung-life (where before you could have

Sworn you always wanted to be) up here with me,

Letting me give you sound and send you out

A little fuller and higher than your fellow floating pockets of molecular existence

Because without you this silly twisted trunk’s only note was

Ker-plunk.

Because even the golden gleaming mammoth — oh no wait especially the gleaming mammoth —

Needs the invisible ignitable science of inhalation.

And so I need you.