Meeting a new manager,
he swept his hand wide of his hip and
swung it back level to clasp my own and
we saw eye to eye
because he was as short as me
with a grip as weathered as mine and
a set to his jaw that let
muscle say more than
stock photographic greetings.
"I bet you fuck
like a king
harried by rebels
on hillsides who
would set themselves
against a pile of stones
if it gave them a reason
to shirk working
for their bread,"
"Keep your head,"
I remind myself
as I am in a perpetual gutter and
easily distracted by flights of extrapolation and
indulgent in long skips of wide throttled glee,
inappropriate
as gone commando uniforms.
With a grain of salt
I take it all and
write notes in my pocket fit book
about how the women sometimes look
like beasts on the savanna
as they hunt
for baking powder in the wrong aisle,
eyes to angry, hungry, slits. The gents
perusing baby food and
engaging in conversations with me
to prove they're not there by choice.
With a grain of salt and
my hard on has everything to do
with reliving the memory of a scene
in a film I saw a decade ago and
not the scene itself, but the
memory of how it made me
so thoroughly aware of what turns me on
at an age when I didn't know
what being turned on was.
And so I am a live wire
on the cusp of snapping
direct into the inseam of my pants and
trying to serve my hours
that I might eat for another week and
live the high life
as far as I've known it and trying
hard not to break and
say something so far out of place
that the damages sever
body parts and put an end to
what I've earned and
what still may yet come to be.
