Dear John, A Man of Letters

You know why a man

Might seduce a girl your daughter’s age.

You’ve told her to wear dresses,

Close her legs when she sits like that.

Help her mother.

Where’s the line?

You thought you were the line.

He took her to the dairy when she was 15.

A kiss is something a girl knows, 

But why did he run pressing his long pants so?

She is learning her role.

To be hurt, wait and never show.

He took her to the beach

Perfect Love, their own Blue Lagoon.

He touched and taught her –

And she will always feel

The shape of what remains.

Teacher at a Catholic school,

He ran the gauntlet, slipped the noose, but kept the habit.

From OS he sent ‘love you’, ‘love you not’ letters, 

He plucked her petals – 

And returned to a stem.

Once back his hand goes

To her closest place and she clamps closed.

The shield is shame and hate.

I would rather burn, says she.

I’m too brittle and you’re too late.

So much writing! She has kept evidence

 - of  words, feelings, touch.

And depression, scaffolding for all that.

It’s kept the girl alive, in a way.

In dreams she cuts herself.

And Man where are you now?

Free coward, trader of daughters.

Why are you sleeping so sound? 

Dream prose, Greece.

I stole a thing from the bow of an old man's boat near the Tropic of Cancer - a souvenir of his priceless cataract view, a kaleidoscope twist on the never-ending story of yoyo yearning, advertorial malleable malaise, bottle stopper love charades, youth lost on pageants of unfixable unbuyable beauty, seas cruised in aid of nothing, irretractable phallic lust machines, the endless dreamless night.

I wanted an old man's shuttered eyelid drawbridge view of my soon spoiled birth and soiled palette of over baked golden skin hues.

I saw his untended nets. I saw his life as one long last day that began virgin tight and unsinkable. I saw the dead muse.

I stole from an old man a carapace as disgraced as a volcano, as telling as an unearned coin and as putrid as forever; but it was just a silent cold thing.