Their bodies are
spindly
their faces earnest and wry
their hands nimble and strong
their walks handsome and calm
They are beautiful,
but I cannot help think of
their yellowed balls.
I don't believe they wash
their slim depressed bodies.
I don't believe they believe in
continued charms
and beauty
they are like little boys
who know
that if they wait around long
enough, their desired woman
will eventually throw up
her lonely hands
and sigh
and be grateful
to have a cock to wrap
herself around.
These artist mouths
are sour to me now
sweat and cigarette-stained
fingertips
they think
they look good in hats
because it is too exhausting
to tell them the truth.
they are the clowns
of a glamorized
sepia masculinity.
they are products of their many
drunken audiences
dull mirroring a nightly
cinematic delusion
they don't know
-- how don't they know?! --
they are the cardboard cutouts
of a longlost cultural epiphany
they are a disney themeride script
a ridiculous appendage
But they are studied
and disciplined
and care for tradition
and use an easy mischief
they are comfortable to be around
and dream after you with lusty eyes
and remind you
of the indie boy love interests
in the movies you dreamed your life
up by before you had ever known
a man, his fickle temper
his boyish body, his sharp pelvis
shoving its way into your soft
wide hips. his tiny shoulders
ragged against your breasts
as you coax him into his
wildest dreams and feel empty.
Your desire contorts
into a sense that you
should feel grateful
to be so sullied
that love
is a fragile object
a trick of the light
that if you lose your hard focus
it will shatter
or float away.
you develop a smoking habit
to cover the ick of his body on yours
you pretend to cum,
and then smoke away your
appetite, satisfy
that hollow annoyance
the irritation of his
wormness, with
the assurance that you
look the part. you assume the role
of the skinny poet's muse
the counterpart
to his audience's daydream.
you moodily elongate your nakedness
in the slanted light
proudly arch through pools of
shadow and smoke above him,
drag a hand up the swerve of your body,
and bury it in your hair.
you are sexy. you smoke. you make it burn.
you harvest more false
desire by watching other
women watch him.
they say you are lucky,
and you use that like porn
when he reaches for you
hungrily in his sleep.
Your life becomes obsessed
with how you are supposed to feel
and you are confused
when that resentment boils
up in you like vomit
and rather than let him sink his
rancid body into you for warmth again,
you tell yourselves you are broken.
too clouded
by this elaborate argument
to remember
the most explicit evidence
that something is wrong is
you allowed
such a creature access
in the first place
too clouded
to remember the way out
of the trap, lost for years here
in the self-imposed tangle of mismatched
half-truths,
its fraudulent wisdom an
endless icey claim on the heart.
So I remember their bodies.
I remember their need for constant
mothering
I remember how their humor and charm
evaporate behind closed doors
and how even the sight
of their satisfaction
slows my blood to a venomous crawl,
and scourges my heart with malice.
A hateful disease
that rakes through my livid body,
and so wastes the life that is meant
to be cherished,
and love freely given.
