To be so broken, wet, saying things
you don’t care about, croaking for warmth,
strapped by the state of me
I’m illogical. You’re critical.
I go for material stuff, the standard lamp’s shine,
I smash it for company, violent like my heart,
you see scales on my skin, the comic hun, the bad egg,
the monster of dependency,
a hunched public enemy,
and dealer in the unacceptable.
You put a brand to my brow,
I scream, it scars, permanent disfigurement,
“unforgiven” it reads.
I become the bad sadness of me
as you turn away, your tones
frogmarching the raw sob of me
back to my shit-smeared cell.
Then later, in solitary, a bash of keys
and you come down on me,
a sudden lust for company
violent like your heart
a rubbing need, a self-determination.
You are muscular and meaty, globs of liquid
fold from your lips.You know the physical, using me,
you know searing me with softness
you know to ruddy me with pink, going beyond
the rude in me, you know breaching the edge,
for I showed you this in stronger times.
You appropriate all of me, I am taken with you,
emptied of bronze, melted for your statue
and what a monument we make to you !
Then you slacken, sigh, linger at my given thigh
and the smell of birth swaddles us.
You mutter opinions in your dawn
while I dress, damply stoic to repeated severance,
stoic to this door closing over again
then Monday.
I back into stained pavements,
the flyovers of humanity,
places where no one stops,
the open prison of the exhausted
and the meek.