I'm homely as a zoo animal.
My brother always said so.
To him, I was Aunt Rita
in miniature, the one who
never married, who, so
the story goes, is eighty seven
and untouched by a man.
But I met Doug, or
at least, met again, for
we were in high school together.
He was a geek but without
the brains, the gift for tinkering
that go along with it.
And he wore the thickest coke-bottle
glasses I have ever seen
Still does.
And we have, dare I say it,
had sex, though we didn't show
our bodies off beforehand like
they do in movies, merely
slipped under the bedclothes.
clumsily undressed, then
held each other so tight
we didn't know whose misshapen
body was whose.
My mother was at work.
But what's it to her.
I'm twenty seven, the only one
who's still at home.
Doug's the same age.
And he removed those hideous
spectacles as I did mine
but we were already focusing
with fingers anyhow.
He says why don't we get married.
That would shock them all.
But then wouldn't everyone
just think we're both getting
what we can, not what we really want.
But what do they know.
Maybe I want a man who
stocks the shelves of grocery stores.
Maybe he wants a woman
who can't decide if the time is
right for her to get those braces.
And what about my brother.
He no longer compares me to a zoo animal
but the look on his face
when he heard the news
would instantly erect a cage around me.
But Doug feels great inside me.
Does anybody know that?
Our lips, I swear, do back-flips
on each other's
and his tongue feels like its
slipping right out of my sauciest dreams.
Is there such a thing as an ugly penis
or even an ugly heart?
And besides, forty years from now,
who will know what was lovely once,
or what was awkward, what was merely
two deluded souls pretending they could love.
Doug says I have beautiful eyes.
And he can't even see them.
How creepy to have forefathers, I reckon.
Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington,
what did they ever do for me besides everything?
The only clothes I wear were made by someone else.
And you keep insisting
that my body is God's,
not God-like, more one of His throwaways.
And you're singing along to the radio,
more lazy pop songwriters putting words into your mouth.
You're capable of loving as long as
you can hum the tune.
And great thoughts are as close as Oprah.
What kind of house is this anyhow?
The architects, the carpenters are long dead
but it's still more theirs than mine.
I turn on a tap
and the water flows freely despite myself.
Likewise the electricity
Edison once again gets there before me.
And there's the car that kicks in as soon as I turn the key.
Thanks for nothing, Japanese equivalent of Henry Ford.
The kids are playing video games
designed by some California nerd
while those next door are knocking a baseball around
with moves stolen from a lifetime
of the Red Sox on TV.
Nothing's an original.
Let's go to the movies.
They're showing what they always show.
Why not read a book, make love,
put the cat out. Everybody's doing it.
Go write a poem, someone suggests.
Whitman I think his name is.
And so there it was, death,
entering the room. No way to stop it.
Just accept the presence and, if you're
not the one it's here for, move on.
And much as it likes to strike down
people in the busy city streets, it will
take its victims lying down, equally as well,
In truth, it has a soft spot for beds
and the ones who take such misguided
comfort in them.
Death never said a thing about how it prefers
to work alone. You could lie beside your husband
if you wished, watching death at work. The last breath,
The great invisible gust of life leaving the body.
Old hat to death. But a novelty to those who've only
ever loved the one man.
And so death, having done its work, left by the same
door it came in. It didn't bother to say to you, don't worry,
your time will come. It was too efficient for that.
Nor ruthless because that requires the human touch.
A human death would enjoy the irony, the heart, this
thing that held you together, being what finally did him in.
But the truth: death is not a philosopher. If anything,
it's a tradesman. It's the last of its kind, really.
No great skills at reassurance. But a talent for entering a room.
John Grey is an Australian-born poet, a US resident since the late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst. He was recently published in Poem, Caveat Lector, Prism International and the horror anthology What Fear Becomes with work upcoming in Big Muddy, Prism International and Writer's Journal.