I was looking for dick
and all I got was this lousy poem.
The phone app tells me I live
in a neighborhood of headless men.
Their severed throats whisper me
a new set of names:
femboy, dickgirl, tranny, victim.
A man asks me if I am a sissy,
and I say, "Yeah,"
thinking he means like Sisyphus, right?
Like none of us want to be here
rolling our boulder bodies
again and again and again and again
to the mouth of another
damp and willing cave.
Wrong.
Instead, he is searching
for a convenient mythology,
old names for this new girl god.
Another calls me "Trap,"
and this must be for all the door
he is imagining me,
as if by naming a thing
you can make it swing open.
Sometimes I wake to a picture of a man,
his cock clenched in his fist
like a brutal key.
I mean I imagine
it would leave me hingeless
and painted red with myself.
He asks me if I want to fuck,
and I say, "Fuck is a word
with such untidy lineage.
Some linguists trace it
to the Swedish foc, meaning penis,
or to the Dutch fukken, to breed,
or back to the common Germanic fuck,
meaning to strike.
And all of these, cognates,
trees severed from the same root.
And this is how we know language
was a temple built for men,
that one word can name sex,
lineage and weapon in the same breath.
Sometimes, y'all...
I wonder why I still have this app at all,
its golden mask unblinking
every time I check my texts.
Seems like these days
everybody's profile says "Looking,"
and nobody needs to ask, "For what?"
The answer, another body
to bury themself inside.
Another man messages me, and he says,
"I bet you would look so beautiful...
as a boy."
And I tell him,
"I already look like one's ghost.
All my curves are chalk lines.
I took the boy in my blood
and I buried him.
You were lusting after a flower
grown in that grave's good dirt."
(cheers and applause)
