You told me it was wrong.

The magnetic pull of my body towards the need.
The way I feel it, the longing, in my chest,
how I place my hands absently on my neck,
sultrily telling you what I'm feeling.

Perhaps it's a ripple of something that has been brewing
for many years. Something always there, underneath.

Heightened by loneliness and summer heat.

Maybe it comes from a lack of normal things,
things which usually accompany
young boys.
Those things I didn't get.

Maybe it's someone's fault.

Maybe I should ask Freud, maybe he
could place his hand on my delicate cheek bone,
how it comes it a gentle hill.

He could stroke the freckled valley underneath my eyeball with his smoking pipe
and tell me pragmatically
the reasons for my feelings,

why I wanted a man to touch me without asking,
to make my face his baby in wrapped cloths.

You told me it was wrong,

like the smoking
done after the house had gone to bed at hushed hours
in the ***** garage.

like the tequila shot I did at the kitchen counter that summer
how it tasted like heat and pine needles,

how it tasted like the wooden chest in our home,
like the inside of it, the dark unvarnished interior
that could hold my tiny body if I had needed to hide

where my father kept his winter sweaters.

And how I ****** it down with the lime that I didn't bite hard enough,
my eyes were red and flooded.

It was wrong.