How a man must hug, and dandle, and kittle, and play a hundred little tricks with his bedfellow
-- Erasmus, "The Praise of Folly"

How a man must dance around my little bombs,
How a man must approach with caution.
I will play the game and disappear
inside a giant ball of twine.

I am made of crumpled tin foil and faucet
fixtures that leak. I have a scrim in front of me
so I always look at things through a filmy net.

Our bed is cold. It twirls around at night
while we are in it, while you dream your normal
backward dreams and I dream my screaming
fuck-you nightmares where I kick
my father’s crotch over and over again. He says,
Yeah? Well fuck me, then.

And when I wake up, I want everything to do
with your arms taken apart from your body -
arms to hold, nothing to do
with your body, such a man’s body.
I just want to be saved
from this body.

On those unbalanced nights when I can’t rest,
I take the magic pill to pound sleep
into me like a forceful lover.
I slip into oblivion, knowing that when I wake
I will believe that all is right
that our bed has stopped spinning
that I am not in any danger of rupturing.

You can stop handling glass
and, finally, I can undress
with the lights on. .

02/05/2005

Posted on 02/05/2005
Copyright © 2024 Lisa Marie Brodsky