Love again, masturbating at three fifteen
(Surely, he’s taken her home by now?)
The bedroom hot like an oven
flattened by drink, without saying how
they’ll meet tomorrow and then
the usual pain, like dysentery.
Someone else feeling her breasts and lower belly
Someone else drowning in that eyelash-laden gaze
And I—forced to play the ignorant one,
to laugh it off, or not care at all
And really… why put it into words?
Better to forget the whole thing.
That thing that spreads into other creatures like a tree,
shaking even them, in some strange way
and says: why did it never work for me?
There’s something about violence in it,
from long ago—and all the wrong lessons,
and the arrogance I never could shed.
