Sex
at Thirty One
Here’s hunger’s sweet spot, I got extra
dough,
have you met my accumulated
competencies?,
is what I thought the year would be.
Under its penumbra, I vowed to string
enough fairy lights end-to-end to make
waver
the dominant view. That and get off.
It was overly lofty. Bulbs burst not
from weakness
but because I dragged them over patio
tiles.
As for my body, I was a bad tenant
in an okay apartment. Onto the
dartboard of the year
a neighbour corked a missive, through
an intermediary,
to please revolve the venetians.
Well. By July, days were also peaking
in their thirties; I scored among the
uniformly
over forty at the beach’s ramble, that
itch a gift
left by a lover whose story I won't
fillet here,
its basic bones being sorrow
and failed largesse. I flagged my heart
out,
learned cruising is public service. As
winds chilled,
my bed pegs split. I lived between
frames
and during the interregnum,
my meetup with college life pulled back
curtains
on cravings for order I didn’t realize
had cured in me.
Unsettled is how I felt. Like how one
bad haircut collapses
the capillaries of our self esteem. The
clinic
endorsed my theory of love as infection
cluster.
On that topic: to a man who predated
this birthday
I said let’s be bandmates on life’s
slutty bus tour. By December I’d red
penciled my plan
for outsmarting my own asshole habits.
Paper
wore until it ripped. Winter was a
smothering ruffle
of short days and longjohns. Loafing
around
my actual days, my style shrunk from
cool
to “cool dad,” I guess that’s not a sex
thing.
I got really into Stevie Nicks. The
year
wrapped around itself like a marriage
in a headlock
and before I nodded off I caught a
glimpse
of the world as I thought it was, a
public
of confidantes, conspirators,
lieutenants
undressing from their idiot clothes,
us sleazebags, saddos and weirdos,
knots of lovers, chains
and chains of clippered buds,
impossible to preserve,
seriatim, stamen, John Stamos, satyr,
sweat, salt.
Marcus McCann is the author of two
books of poetry and ten chapbooks. His work has been awarded the John Newlove
Award and the EJ Pratt Medal for poetry. Find recent poems in Best Canadian Poetry 2015, THIS Magazine, Matrix, Riddlefence, The Steel Chisel and Plenitude. @mmccnn
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