An Image of the Male Body

The untouched male body

I live in

Walks into a dark house at eight p.m.

And talks to himself

With simulated sitcom conversations

Of how was and guess what

Dinner is always in the refrigerated plastic

Cooked ahead for the week

Consumed in totality by this stomach and these lips

Subsisting in a deficit of tactile contact

Recycled folly exercises honed in the realization of the way

A woman texts “I don’t feel romantic potential between us.”

The awful politeness of coded honesties

To be a man who was engrained so young to know

I am one of the ugly ones

I think women look at me the way I look at the ugly women

So it is one big animal pit of fleshed judgment

I am almost forty  

The sexlessness is the only Catholic thing left in me

I can no longer blame god for the celibacy

This is just dry runs bathed in PTSD and the mirror

The ghosted unreturned phone calls and the never given chances

This time I gave her a ride home mid-date

After she left to move lumber from incoming rainfall

My penis finds this humorous

The curtesy, the indifference

Never long enough to receive hatred or anger this decade

Just terminal expedient assessment of no thank you

A divorced man with an executive salary

A yoga body with muscled abdomen

A full head of hair

Re-transplanted top-dollar smile

And this face of lonely blue eyes 

Questioning his entire life how to talk to females

As anything other than friends

The sexlessness exudes my pores so much

I was once kicked out of an erotic writers group

By email because my demisexuality was not up to snuff

No retort just go, please stop, another no thank you for your service

We just do not see how you fit in here

I remember the week before my wife left

After ten years the last time we had sex

Was at her company Christmas Party

At a hotel on Bourbon Street

The image of her body on top of me rattles in my brain like rape

I remember how she insisted on the condom

I remember her anger at showing me in public

When we went downstairs for the dinner

I remember how clueless I was of what she was about to announce 
The unreadable beast was soon to devour me in courtrooms

I think of this decade since

This so long untouched skin

I want to feel safe

Like there ever was a place

Timid for coquetry in this Me-Too era

I want to play

Patience from the other seems so short

To get to know these cheeks

Like rusted bicycle spokes unridden left out in the rain

Sometimes I put my fingers to brushing up from the neck

Washing up to forehead, closing my eyes

Dreaming that this is not my limb

That the whole universe is one big thing

So it is like even in this dark house at eight p.m.

I am not alone.
Laughter percolates in a tussle of permanent loneliness

Naked honesty since thirteen that this predictable

Early death, unattended cremation outcome keeps materializing

The deadliness in sex, fear in touch

The consequential atrocities of an untouched human body