When you told me - at one AM, no less!-
that it was high time we moved in together,
close the gap of state lines in
an orthodontist like way, I must admit I panicked
(zebra caught in the maw of the crocodile, pulled into
murky tepid water as the killer cries softly)
and hid behind my mother.

Freud would have have a hey-day,
much like my father does with pointing
out his pain, sticking from his chest like
a tumor shaped like a mango. I bite down
and the juice runs sticky sweet down my chin.

He and I pass (not ships in the night, but more like
a couple addicts hoping to score from each other)
all too often: I want him for a year or a thousand,
he wants more of me NOW and now I'm afraid.
More used to rejection than anything, like a
battered woman with her broken window eyes and
abandoned house cheek bones
                                                                             hollow
the noises from her mouth sound like
dog whimpers and battery acid on skin.

Is it possible to house such a dichotomy in one body?

I told a co-worker that I was a paradox:
I like rugby and riding horses, I work at
McDonalds but the food makes me hurl.
I just didn't expect it to be true.

The man on the radio is a hypocrite.
The man in the office is a hypocrite.
The man constructing weapons to protect people, too.
My drug consuming friends are hypocrites,
claiming superiority as they exchange Hamilton
for a sugar cube so they can fear trees and shadows.

You can stay with me, his voice fades and grows
because I'm impatient and fuck around with the
volume controls on the side of my phone. you CAN StAy
with mE, WE'LL Both work and pay rent anD go to schoOL
AND GraduaTE AND THen we might marry and HAVE A SON
THat i take fishing WIThouT YOu.

No, I mutter, muffling my words so he doesn't know that
I'm actually thinking about
taking a shotgun and
shooting up the town.

No, I like fishing. I just fear their open eyes and
grasping mouths and the bones that wait
underneath the surface, rigidity in the fluid scales.
The damn secret hypocrite fish. It's why they can't
breathe air, I think, which is why none of us are really
breathing it either.