Hungry Corpse

I find a vampiric hunger for the sacred feminine

That is inside this masculinity monstrous

Hedging passage into the suicidal,

For this untouched muscle is a living death

To hold conversation expressing feeling

Without the belief of perceived transmogrification

Into the lot of stalker or internet comment section hunchback

Smattered in either indifference or ignominious castigation

Isolate into the self-talk, the closet of silence

Knowing the ringing Tinnitus, the vertigo illusions

Of wanting to feel greenery inside

The cobwebbed shadowed compartments of post-divorce Me-Too America

The over-abundance of caution in dating the nation of the once sexually abused

The reluctance to initiate coquetry without this hedge maze of consent

Inside one’s psyche that says, “She does not really even want to be here.”

Knowing I could be fooled for a decade of a marriage and not know

There is an anchor in me, a carving tool of metal plunked to the sea floor

Clawed in through hurricane and rig explosion

A deep-well Louisiana oil muck

The Kraken that fled me into the cavern of atheism

Safety in nonbelief

That there ever was a plan

Merely billiard ball mathematics

In the countless tears to the empty side of the bedrock

Crying out as if there was a nest of breasts to lay my cheek

These eyes at rest in fathomless softness

So foreign to manhood that this body shakes in caked on metal

Armored skin to breathe in and out without fidget

My body becomes ever isolationist

Statuesque dehumanized in such unipolar sensorial intake

An inner world of convalescence tasting compassion like contraband whiskey

The slow sip of old fashioned bitters in a gentleman’s agreement

Hope shall not enter here

I am not allowed to be an injured thing

I am to be a hunter, confident in a world of monsters

Daring to say I would like to get to know you

Is the talk of flowered men stomped and castrated

Be a devourer, comment on the deliciousness of women

Boast of rapaciousness, bulge and detach serpentine jaw

Slide maw, disclose nothing and ask, “Do you want hear The Snake story?”

I know the terror in misplaced hope.

The moved-away, the absent invitations

The wanting to kill myself dogeared pages

The prayers for any kind of response

The rut of libraries and skipped school lunches

The fear of the sitting in a large space

Building up skin to learn how to go everywhere alone

To accept this is how life was likely always to be

I remember the anticipation in knowing when the jig is up

When the other party you so wish to believe

Will help break the pattern can smell the desperation on you

Recycling the exquisite silence

The bubbled garbled speech

Wrinkled oddity

Hours that go by like descending pillared prison bars from heaven’s cackle

Splintering perception through which one perceives one more soul off limits

Choice of sequestered silence absent explanation or interest

In how another is feeling to interface with commensurate presence

The immensity of disproportionate valuation registers

Like water to a desert or rainforest dweller

So it is the nature of things

These mirages

Always so hungry mouthing phantasms of hope

In dead bodies