I can still remember the subway platform.
And I can still taste the burn marks on
my lips
From when I spewed the all of the fire
of my desire
Into your ear so that you could look
back at me
And tell me everything I wanted to hear.
But in my indignant lonely stride I
realized that
No matter how hard you fight for empathy
A romantic can only have so much sincerity
When they exclusively donate to their
own charity.
Because the mornings stay so woefully
the same,
And the cravings still take over and remain, and I’ll
Complain … to every skeleton with an eardrum
Or any gossiper so deprived of these
nauseating flings that
They’ll drop everything just to sit down
next to you and feel some.

I’ll tell them about how I sat with you
at the piano,
And you vibrated the strings with the tips
of your fingers
And sight read the chart, leaving me
desperate to tell you
Everything I felt but having no idea
where to start,
And as sparks of what could be filled the air
they did as sparks do and soon couldn’t be seen anywhere,
and now two weeks after the affair I can feel the flesh around my teeth begin to tear,
when I think about what it meant to lie in bed and twirl your hair,

Because now you’re inviting my friend
over to learn origami, and it
Won’t be long before you learn the tucks
and folds of each other
But it gets worse when I bring this all to
my dad, and he says
Nate, I don’t understand why you can’t be mad, and I told him
Yes, I may have felt her caress, and yes,
it was only a week later
That I saw the hand of another man
in hers, but it
Makes sense if you allow me to put it
in context.

It is luminous when rejected men are
dripping in hubris,
Because how the f*** is a woman supposed to live her life constantly
Ducking the elated egos of men?
Though this may not be the fifties, men are introducing a new form of propriety.
One that runs on an engine of shame, and comes with a cannon to displace the blame.
But even though the modern man with a broken heart is never willing to
compromise, it will never be the
responsibility of a woman to make sure that their suitors don’t over-romanticize.