Wednesday, September 4, 2024

booby traps June 17, 2012

 



I tell her the pizza story

 is the best she’s ever done 

which is not true.

 Her poetry is better and yet,

 it drips with something

 exuding a strange pheromone 

I can’t ignore, 

one of many she’s done

 in which I get caught, 

like fly paper 

I can’t escape 

once I put my fingers on it, 

so sticky, I ache 

when I try, 

the old woman

 in the senior luncheon 

who wants a man to fuck

 or the hints in other stories 

of touching and being touched, 

she, shrugging off my complement

 as if she knows the truth already, 

how inescapable we find them

 once we get attached,

 more of the same quagmire, 

the need for her attention, 

and these small booby traps she sets

 we can’t keep from setting off,

 in our heads, in our dreams 

in our vivid imaginations.


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