Adored

You weren’t like other girls.

It always felt like you were entering the room

When everyone else was

Walking out.

Our last, first kiss,

When you took off your shirt, and your bra,

Exposing your back to me.

Titillating me by coming onto Mike

Until I called you away from him,

Cradling your breast in my hands,

And got you to make love to me instead

And three days later,

You and I were living together.

Most girls left me wishing I had

A nice inheritance

Or at least better bag of bullshit.

But you, you were so phenomenally

Intense!

You thought mulligatawny was a dirty word

Until I told you what it was—

And then you thought I was dirty!

“I was raised in a satanic cult.” you once confided in me,

Then added, “I’ve got a secret; I love you,”

“…and I am a pathological liar!”

Knowing that I could never misunderstand.

You loved with a perfect wit,

And a lunatic wail…

Remember that summer when we stopped working out

Because that working out thing

Just wasn’t working out?

And so all summer long we scrogged like little bees

Fucking off the pastries

We’d eaten in the morning—

And remember that asshole neighbor who was

Always hawking that, “I’m a surfer, not a soldier!” smugness?

Until one day, I just couldn’t take it anymore,

So I punched him in the nuts!

Self-righteous fuckers shied away from us

After that…

Alone in a world

Where human beings loved as sincerely as dogs,

You opened your ears whenever I opened my mouth,

And the intensity with which you understood my chaos

Felt dreadfully unsettling!

It reminded me of what Bill Cosby said, that

“Every closed eye is not sleeping,

And every open eye is not seeing.”

For you were not sleeping, and I

Was clearly, not awake.

But this was how I taught you

Not to expect too much from me,

Then I became ashamed of how readily

I conformed to your lowered expectations.

The dimples in the small of your back,

Once the embodiment of all my hopes,

Soon became an obligation you came to resent.

You, the risk-taker—vibrant!

Always goading me to wish I was a better person,

Even when it was so perfectly clear

That I simply was not.

Tangled up in blue

Tangled up in you

It was all tangled now…

Dead fish in the stream who mused about Yogi Berra

Who once said,

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

And we knew how to do that,

So we felt safe—

Allowing the blessings of experience to make us sharper

With each cut.

From whose bright lamp it shone

Neither great in patience, nor in sorrow, yet also

Not great in shame—

Though fraught with all the imperfections

The hands of our minds

Had wrought,

And deeply desirous of a world

Where people didn’t know

How full of shit we were.

You needed God, and I, a therapist,

And time to savor these exploding moments…

But one day, we found ourselves in a strange land,

No longer strangers, and so, no longer with charm—

Just an iceberg of habits and tedium

The depths of which we were both

Loathed to plumb.

Whipped dogs that didn’t bark

A bent dick that didn’t fuck,

On a really, really bad day

To be African-American.

Sorrow

Had finally fist-fucked its way

Into our relationship.