To him, everything feminine sweet greed inducing is me. To the boys, too, who followed my episodic lives. Consider only two of these: first, sensuous, white, the Venus to his lonely sculptor. Not to him in solitude, either. I could not guess the number of you out there who longed to stroke my preening thighs. I like to keep my lives in order (unlike some). Then, ghetto hetto queen to his bourgeois muscle, I met him toe to toe purr – don’t tell me I don’t know the concept of screwed over. I know. He knows, too, chewed up like he is. But this is the secret of how his story continues month to month: his worst wounds were inflicted on someone else. Not quite like Nietzsche put it. The thing which killed them left him stronger. I know him. He knows me. Our hurts connect like one of those twisted prints where everyone strides to the top, only to wind up below where they once stood. If he confessed, it would be to this: loving the lowest murmurs within my neck, the sound like dying mixed with joy.
© Richard Harrison
Image by Emma Harrison Rouleau
Peterborough Poets 