Counting

I hope this finds you pulling out your shorts and sandals, so close!

Counting

According to the package of Dove’s dark chocolate
easter eggs, there are six eggs in a serving.
220 calories, that’s 36.67 calories each.
If I want to lose 5 pounds
before a trip to Hawaii, which is in 5 weeks,
I need to lose a pound a week.
7 days in a week means,
blasted,
I need to eat 500 calories less than I do now.
The equivalent of eating 13.63 less Doves,
one less pastry from Starbucks, one less tummy yummy,
many less moments of melting.

The dollars in my bank account
bring pleasure or panic.
As do running tabs of grocery bills and taxes,
And tracking time, lordy.
37 minutes to get to work on a good day,
a woman needs 25 minutes of foreplay to orgasm.
The average American has two per week.
If I am generous I’ll grant us all fifty years of sex,
5,200 O’s, both too much and too little.

How many beers on a week night?
Weekend? How many cigarettes per pack?
We bargain and batch it, track and patch it.
I allow two cups of earl gray tea, one of coffee
a diet soda every other day.
And wonder somedays, what if I did eat
chocolate, drank soda alllllllll day.

An medium lifespan is the US is 80 years,
42,048,000 minutes.
Andy Warhol, a pop artist, suggested we
all get 15 minutes of fame.
That’s .000036% of our lives.
My children have been famous to me for at least 15 years.
Spalding Gray, a famous writer,
hoped for 15 minutes of perfection during each vacation.

The chocolates are wrapped in lovely lavender foil.
I bite them in thirds, they are the size of a robin’s egg
or at least the robin’s egg in the fake nests at the
craft store, my only reference of late.
Divided and slowly sucked,
the chocolates take 5.36 minutes to eat.
4.23 minutes later I want another.
The average orgasm lasts, “if you are lucky” 20 seconds.
That is 26.8 orgasms per chocolate,
no wonder a ladies magazine article
said most women if given the choice prefer to have cocoa.
Harder to quantify intensity though,
and of course we must account for all that build up
and (hopefully) post coitus cuddling.

It is the perfect equinox of spring today,
a handoff in a relay race between
winter and summer, the baton securely thrust.
Clouds like breaching beluga whales swim among
blue sky the color of swimming pools spotted from the air.

I can’t say I’ve really given anything
my FULL attention for 15 minutes. 
Today, is a day worthy as any,
I tried for 15 seconds.
A bumblebee drunkedly buzzed me,
the hair on its body mascara black.
The outline of tree branches and tree trunks
were still visible, their skeletons like runway models,
whose new collection awaits eagerly in dressings rooms.
There blossoms on the trees
were orderly as beads on an abacus,
counting with the maples,
who chartreuse cheered the incoming leaves,
each tender as skin on your forearm.