Everyone wants to end up in bed
watching Deadwood with someone who smells nice.
All the adjuncts and admins, politically incorrect art directors,
Presbyterian Western Union clerks, lawyers at nonprofits
and the rest of us—we know the spread eagle
fall from eleven stories up, the heart flop
from a great height—SMASH—into hell's
frozen-over lakes. We know devastated.
We know watching Deadwood in bed
with someone who smells nice is the rapture.
We also know what the problem is:
You aren’t interested in sixty-nineing right now.
You call the dog cuddle bunny to its face.
You won't shut up about all the times you got your drunk on
in college or how refined your trivia skills are.
Your myth is infrequently interested in mything our myth.
Our myth knows that we must leave
this bed, this Deadwood, this nice smell
because you will never shut up or stop drinking
or get health insurance or wake up
tomorrow and leave us satisfied.
You will instead lead to dog hair in our mouths,
our clothes, our ears, our eyes, and somehow
even the warm lonesome crotch of our underwear,
you will lead to one continuous story about doing shots
and on top of that, you are deaf in one ear
which leads to subtitles that are littered
with adverbs [laughs evilly] and periodically translated
incorrectly even though the translation is English to English.
We are too distracted to keep looking
from Bullock’s glare to the subtitles and back,
so we think about sex and about how
we are not having it right now.
Out of all the goals we failed at
(adulthood, scrabble champion of the world,
no longer loathing ourselves)
not having sex at this particular moment
is more grim than any other apprehension.
It's enough to make us slander that Epicurean
vision that had been our ambition.
We thought if we made our wants modest
enough, it would lead to a happy enormity.
No go. We are not Stoics. We are not the David.
But we are beautiful and carved out and marble eyed
even if no one wants to fuck us.
Our want conquers us,
our want is the hollering enormity,
more immense than our worries,
our want is loud and stomp
and winsome and a bad match.
When you picture your heart,
is it a smacked ass or a bloodwarm tick?
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