slow dance

i don’t like slow dances. 

i guess i haven’t really had any.

no awkward middle school dances.

no one ever loved so much could just

do it for fun in the kitchen.

dances with exquisite strangers?

sort of. pounding grinding leading to

stairwell sex in new orleans. 

bathroom techno sex in sf.

lots of people who don’t care about you

and they disgust you but well

you’re just so high you’re out of your head

and maybe this will make it feel

like you’ve got some kind of control again.

and it kind of does because for a second

you don’t feel anything and that 

post super unhuman moment is what you

have all the sex and the drugs 

and get gone gone gones for because

people walk out on you and the doctor said

you probably had borderline personality disorder

and bipolar disorder and she didn’t say this but

you probably inherited your dad’s paranoid schizophrenia

but you were too young to diagnose and now 

for no logical reason you’re too scared

to go back and learn the truth.

so you go back and forth between first and

second person to deflect your fear away

from you to say it belongs to anyone

else at all just not to me. and then i go

to santa cruz and dance to the live music

anthony plays and for a little while i feel

something and it is happy. and a little 

while later some balding old man

tries to dance with me and gets handsy 

like every old man you’ve ever known

since mr. scott next door groped you

when you were seven. then you go to the

bathroom and cry until the glitter drips

off and you swear at yourself in the mirror

and say i’m so god damn stupid for crying.

and then you wipe the glitter off

and do a line of coke off the toilet seat

and then i open the door and i dance but never slow.

—October 2021, Stanford, CA