A Brief Attachment

I regard your affections, find your teeth have left me a bruise necklace. Those lipstick marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile. Your 40 ounces of malt liquor, your shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs when I've left the room, penned in your girl's cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations of what I refuse to hand over. It's a nice touch, though: a little love to accompany the cancer. My thought follows you to where you spend your days lying in bed, smoking and reading the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes circles you, rising like a moat after rainfall. Often you are a study in detachment—the trigger eye is your eye, still as a finger poised to press should one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder how you can hate men so much when you think like one. Think of what I could be doing outside if I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini, think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were a number, I'd subtract you; if you were a sentence, I'd rewrite you. Are you the one who left these wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes? If you are weather, then I am a town, closing down at word of your coming: you're a glacier on fast forward, you're direct as a detour, when I say good-bye you move in next door. You say you want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car, and you're too young to enter a bar. I should tether you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar, walk you around the block and show you off.