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She showed up limping and my hackles were raised.
I know that limp.
I know that gaze; 1000 yards away.
...(what happened?)...
She could hardly sit down, kept shifting her weight side to side, unable to find comfort, even on a padded bar stool.

"He's a good guy," she said.
"I don't know why...where it came from...I tried to do everything right."

"Trick-***-**-*****!! Lucky I don't **** you."

"At least I've still got my teeth," she offered.

I listen with an open heart to her,
say it's not her fault.
She knows, but why does this keep happening?
I wish I had an answer.

She flinched as I touched her shoulder.
I see now that this, too, was violence.  Physical invasion.
Blurred lines of cruelty and concern, warmth and wickedness.

"No one will believe me...cause he's a good guy..."

I hear you and I believe.
They say I'm in for a year long trip. But maybe less.
a year, or less, of sea sickness, the kind of which no Dramamine will soothe.
I'm surrounded by water I can't keep down
and kept afloat by dark women in white coats.
This clipboard is my life-vest.

Better say good bye now because,
when I finally wash ashore, it won't be to the home I left.

My bed will look very different.
My lover, too.  It will be much longer than a year for her.  
She'll live a lifetime, again and again, with every moon and every sun,
Her body revealing the truths her spirit can't yet face.

Until then she'll stand by water's edge and throw corked bottles of brilliant green past the froth, invoking Poseidon's dominion,
inaudible over the ocean's orchestral din.
Danger

It’s a trap

Don’t go in there

Beware the dog

Who both barks and bites

Brilliant steel overhead

False bottoms

Coils spring to life

It’s a trap

Fall in
It is hard to walk with only one hip.
The other is attached to my lover
and it feels like I’ve put it on layaway.

Week after week making small deposits to get it back
and yet to find, years later, I have only begun to pay down the interest.
Bored of beauty.
**** and ***
blizzard white teeth
insertable parts switched out like lego blocks.
Inching away from this faulty form
with which I was imbued in genesis.

Long live that junk, ******!
Gimme those thighs!
Let free that emotional magma
boiling up from beneath, ready to burn this world
or at the least leave your laces singed.

The tip of this iceberg will bring you all down
so ready the life-rafts.
Gimme that.

Don’t give me blizzard teeth, silent in a quaffed muzzle.
Be the jaws, the howl, the tender tongue on young necks.
Great stories don’t read “one day I was beautiful”
they say “the world seized me and tore off my limbs, and I toppled end over end til I came to rest between the legs of the Colossus

and that’s when it got interesting.”

— The End —