Tag: shame

Feigning

Here I am again, not fitting my skin

Up against the stucco wall, saying words about men and jobs and kids

Parrot-like, not knowing what they mean or why I recite them

Other than to stay hidden. The work of it wears me to a nub.

My back is too straight, my hands twisted into girl-scout knots

I think. I never knew a girl scout, but I read the guide. Fire comes easy.

 

They twitter around me like birds, shiny beady eyes suspicious

I move slowly, lest to startle them and incite a mass ascension

Leaving me bare and featherless, shamed and flightless.

Hug, hug, kiss, kiss

Finally in my car I relax, the hard bones brazen

My dirty feet, my snarled hair. The smell of a campfire.

Leagues Apart

Your negligent hands around my throat, compressing the very air

Compressing my meditation on myself, my internal worth to a pinpoint of white on black

Craving you, breathing you, I want to break your bones with my teeth and errant thoughts

Your brother ran naked after my car, tears on his cheeks and a bruised heart

While you stared with pale eyes through the rain-streaked window, thousand-yard stare

The stare you stared while they took her out behind the bushes, set down weapons

And you listened to her scream, and you watched the sand swirl, and you did your job.

Because we do our jobs, because of this I want you to break me, I want you.

In our own desert, with the break between us chasm-like, I reach out over it

Only to feel the cold wind of bottomless depths. I smoke a cigarette, though I don’t smoke

I walk alone in the rock garden until you come to find me, out of duty, only duty

Call of duty, a game to you and obloquy to me. The shame of the hands and my neck

And the way my body craves it, is a supplicant to the sham of your adamantine volition.

Ferine, I burrow toward your heart, or what beats within you, I own your skin while you watch

From leagues apart, from leagues above, clinical, detached with only your own words to comfort you.