Top of the Line

A poem about attraction and social chaos that imagines return not as comfort but as a dangerous pull back toward everything unfinished.

'Top of the Line' is a love poem about the failure to synthesize: 'Love, the problem is / I can not put it all together / Together that is at the same time / The vision I have of all the madness / at once'. Unable to hold the whole, the speaker instead catalogs a generation - 'The old star grace of the girls; / the new convect mentality of the men / The kids waiting wide for anything / that has not gone on before' - and everything 'ever left and still alive / coming back to the same spot'. It closes on a split image of desire: 'Some kiss the Moon cause it's closer / Some kiss the Sun cause it's explosive'.

The title's commercial phrase, 'Top of the Line', sits ironically over a poem whose real subject is that no single product, person, or vision can be the best because the speaker cannot assemble them 'all... at once'. The confession of simultaneity-failure is the engine: love demands totality, and the mind can only list. The inventory itself is sharp social observation - 'old star grace' fuses glamour with something already vanished, while 'new convect mentality of the men' (the source spelling preserved, suggesting convict or convect heat) brands the men as either criminalized or overheated and modern. The closing antithesis is the finest turn: the Moon kissed 'cause it's closer' versus the Sun 'cause it's explosive' divides desire into the attainable and the annihilating, two incompatible appetites the speaker cannot reconcile - which is exactly the impossibility the opening line announced. The poem enacts its own complaint, and that honesty is its achievement.