Jeffrey Ethan Lee (Boulder, Colorado, USA): "Invitation To A Disaster"

Skin hungry for your hands,
she comes up to your bedroom as a fan
of your poetry, but you’re Nobody, you say.
It doesn’t matter, she says.
She’s not the woman you love and can’t have,
she’s the baby you can have, and want,
in eccentric old clothes.
She keeps you up late cuddling her blues
which is fine, except she takes everything off,
(complaining it’s so hot!)
except her worn-out panties,
and it’s late but she doesn’t want to.

So, you sleep on the floor,
on something rock-hard, in your clothes.
Also, she wails her loneliness
and jealousy of your past.
But we just met, you say—
it doesn’t matter, she cries.
How can she be mad as a wife
on a first date, you think,
but it’s too late and sleep
overwhelms you and you recede.

Only near dawn, when she stumbles by casually,
half-waking and mostly naked,
and you reach up hungrily for her skin, tug her in,
you roll with her in your lust.
She steams up like dunked toast,
then crumbles into dripping sobs,
and then you have to stop,
soothe her and hold her together,
tenderly, as the non-drunk Dad she never had—
dawn enforces she really wants something else.

© Jeffrey Ethan Lee 2005