Peter Boysen
She makes me dinner
She gives good hugs
She has a pleasant laugh
She rubs my dog’s belly
So I buy her cards,
Take her to dinner,
Watch her dogs when she’s out of town.
She wants me to need her
But all I can do is like her a little
I want to need,
Want to want,
But when I push those buttons
I just get those same clicks you hear
When your car battery
Has finally died.
I think I need therapy, or just a pair of jumper cables sizzling
my brain
Kissing her is arranging those icing flowers around the edge of
a cake
Touching her is reaching for a leather jacket but finding a
sweater
And sex? Unless it begins when I’m lost in a dream
And wake to find that I’ve just ravished her, when it’s over
I either feel glad we made it through
Or I feel a clear plastic bag tightening around
My head, my chest, my body,
And when I finish, that bag seals tightly,
Just before a crane lifts me, drops me into a dumpster
Far from home, far from me.
***
Peter Boysen has taught literature for the past twenty-three years and is the proud father of triplets. He has written professionally for fourteen years and is publishing his first poems.