Desensitization in a few parts
When Ben married Hannah I flung my arms
to him, felt the familiar squeeze
on my kidneys and said, I’m so proud
of you, which was one-part
what I meant without wholly knowing
or neglecting the rest, a year later
splayed warmly on their floor
I think, Anybody who thinks
they’re too good for you
is not good enough, and that I’d lose
a lot of weight if I only ate
drunk, chewing becomes so hard
it’s almost pain, I am certain
if you read Anne Sexton
and find most of the crazy shit
she says holds true for you
then you’re only half as mad
as she was, and you thought
you were, and you will never escape
military service come
crunch time. They will take you
and your blood brains, and heart a
flavorless pudding in which a few
cigarettes were put out as experiments
in addling humanity
through touch. The professor found it
to be ruinous. A tentative bite
taken from you, I try to gauge
the speed of a traveling train
by how often it shrieks over
imperfections in the tracks, I gloss
over my own face to take up my hips
in my hands, stretch them from thumb
to thumb like canvas, and confirm
internally that no one could crawl
from one to the other in time to love me
without perishing in the desert between,
from sunstroke or
I see
how seamlessly I move from worshiping
one bed and its set of desperate
consequences, to the next, and think
the transitory sound never even
registers, the steel lays sturdily
in its beams, my little passengers lie
staunchly in their sleep, so deeply none
the wiser that I wonder
if, when the time comes
they’ll have enough commuter’s
instinct left to jolt awake
in the instance of emergency
or their stop.
