O unreliable narrator of my loins!
I gird myself, I mean I pull a seam-backed nylon
over the creampuff of my head. For you.
To contain myself, my mess, hold it in tight and slim,
except it’s not needed: my flesh is weak
but my mind is a bear trap, I mean, a steel-
toed shit-kicker. I mean, I am empty of lust
as a pork loin. I am drunk with whole milk.
I am the abandoner I mean I never leave my house.
So where would we do it, slow and illicit one?
When I lie down I mean to sleep.
I failure the affair because well look
I had a girl and she ran off with my best goods.
Now I’m just the saggy bag what kept her,
now kicked to shit, a creampuff in a hold-up.
But o you crack me up, you hold me,
telling your story with its crooked ending,
its white derriere I cannot name
much less touch or see. I mean,
do you even have a body, Young Goodman Brown?
A black mass I could stroke and call my own?
Little antelope? Something I could “sleep with”?
Look, everyone sleeps with herself
inside her locked-up, knocked-up dream.
Sex is no key. Sex is off key.
Sex is a rock star I was once told I could be
but you back me up I mean I’m your guitar
I mean effects pedal: nudge me with your foot
ever so gently and I distort.
I once looked for love in an elevator every spring.
(I once got my shoelace caught in an escalator too
but I mean) I once looked deep into spring
for the cartoon sunshine arcing in the shame
of someone’s golden cheek, his or hers or his,
beautiful, adorable, oh my god
I mean I adored it, adored widely, was crushed by it.
Now I look into the backs of parked cars
for the empty infant car seats.
I count the evidence of other people’s loins,
the mess of their streaks, the mass of their hot little bodies.
This is my crush. These are my brethren,
these invisible drivers, sexless parents
ghosted and followed by their adorable children.
This is what I have in common with the world.
With you, narrator, I have nothing.
Without you, I’m everything, enormous.
I mean I’m married and you’re married but much cuter
(and smaller, and childless) and marriage is a soft, soft place,
a streaked and aching loin, a creampuff
bobbing along in the bathtub.
A creamy caramel center. The give of lead
in the sweet hot core of a bullet,
the sweet red poison on the dip of an arrow.
I mean I’m hunted, a dragon, droopy-eyed and greedy.
Dragons by definition go to bed alone,
the cold gold coins sticking to their warm white bellies.
O unreliable, I am creamy and exposed for this.
By this I guess I mean my loins.
I’m covered in so much sleepy gold—
my enormous, one-tailed, messed and streaky self—
that I cannot locate that one open place,
the single inch of surprise skin that could kill me,
that could be for you and your crooked, lying arrow.