song against sex

On this lovely morning the jury is hung &the house echoes nothings , now everyone’s gone. It’s the coldest day I’ve seen in December thus far. I don’t want to stock up for the winter, So I’m calling for a hunger-strike. I’m cashing in coupons and saving up my change for salvation or a pack of cigarettes. You’ll be holding your daughter while the laundry dries in my backyard. I’ll marry a doctor after witnessing a message (not a murder) &from here on out I’ll invest in good men—not lost boys—and I’ll watch the skyline like a monument. I’ll watch the window for your silhouette &if you return I’ll shoot you down. We’ll call the troops &act on instinct. I will forget your stomach and your backbone and I will believe in day traders instead of night traitors so when the storm comes in it will all fall into place. There’s a place for you in everything, especially the scripture you read your daughter every night, wanting her so badly to believe in something, in something more than the man made lakes you try and drown in every single night.

And you know I’m not a good swimmer, that I’ve started drinking too much coffee again. That Blair gives me donuts while I sit at the counter of Jimmy’s Diner and write, like some version of a regular, or Perez Hilton. I want to tell the man lying naked next to me in my bed that when I go stay at my parent’s house it’s like wanting to play a piano that already plays itself. The man laying next to me in bed, I don’t think he really wants me to tell him anything at all. I go on anyway: I want to be a regular, but I don’t want my teeth to get stained in the process, so I am going to drink this coffee through a straw, I am going to wipe these crumbs from my mouth. I need to call Trade Secret in Clearwater, Florida, call the mall where I used to work and demand that Randy Phoenix fix my hair. Randy, everyone has ruined it, they’ve ravaged it. It’s everyone’s hands all up on my head, all up in my grill.

I’ve been living it out in bathtubs, touching necks that don’t remind me of yours. It’s not that it’s really different from what it used to be, you know? It’s just that my position has changed. I’m always eager in the kitchen, perched over the sink with my middle finger reaching further down my throat then you had ever even thought of going. Still you’re the one taunting my insides, begging my breasts to bring up the past and then watch it as it’s swept up with the sink and trembles down the drain. “You’ll never be a regular, Daniela Scrima, you don’t even have that in you, look, you’ve gotten crumbs all up in your hair.”
Failed attempts at just bein’ a human, like last week when I tried to take up smoking and couldnt decide on which hand would be held or which man would wake up naked next to me in bed—but I knew the lighting would be perfect, I knew the music would be queued, and the dogs would be shitting on the pristine tile floor. You were looking at me like you were the palm reader, like out of all of the women in the world , you could hold this deck of cards over me, telling me no man wants to play games during the first cold week of December.

A storm front was coming &the semen was damned. I told you that was my favorite television show but I don’t know why you believed me. The troops were lyin out in front of trenches, I was slathering on tanning lotion, massaging the bullet holes in your chest. Everyone’s laughing when I’m talking, except Nick, who knows I’ve never made a joke in my life, who knows he shares the same name as my father, and knows that to me, well names, mean everything. He asks for prawns to break my spirit. The troops call their estranged mother’s and their hot tempered daddies and they read the truth from index cards that I keep in my room. They laugh when you love me and they die when you declare that love is dead. You want to see my signature pose? My leg trick? It seems like I’ll do it for just about anyone, these days.

I go to my old apartment and sit with my old roommate who calls are old supplier while we sit on the old carpet. I say “when I first moved to New York City, I slept next to that radiator, right on the floor,” You round up my influence and you kiss their wrists and ankles like love is your middle name. Like love was my middle name. Cuts on lips will always remind me of you. God wouldn’t dare damn a boy like you. Not with the stars so soft and the view so clear. God couldn’t do that to us, no sir, no baby, no never. If God did he would have nowhere to showcase the New York City skyline—the one so obscured with structures that it would forever remind you of free men and dying women, the one so dark sans constellations that we wont even know when an old moon meets new. The God you believe in, well that God let me in on his big secret, kid, he warned me that boys will be boys until he sees a man where the moon should be.

On Monday, my stock broker broke down and bought a shotgun. It’s the market, it’s the times, it’s the collapse, don’t forget to do nothing when Wednesday comes, we got to prove were equal after all. You say, you say. Just like you did last week, telling me on Thanksgiving that you bought one too. You say all men have guns in Virginia, baby, don’t get so blue. This soups on the house. You tell me to stop pretend I am south of the Mason-Dixon line. You look at me with wide eyes and say “this is not a wise investment, see in New York City, we call boys like this a ‘throw-away,” you look around my bedrooms, noticing the bones &bruises. I tell one man that I am an individual and I tell another that I am made of metal, that they never gave me braces so my mouth and manners and movements are crooked. Let’s get Cotarded in here.. Let’s get Cotarded in here.

The jury is hung, the crumbs in my hair, the soups getting cold, you’re telling me to get the fuck away from the counter, you’re saying “put your clothes back on, this is my song &you’re not going to steal it”.
In bed naked, I don’t want to give a speech unless it’s a monologue. A monologue I learned a long time ago, and I’m gonna deliver it in any voice that I want to. Maybe I will become a regular, maybe I’ll sit at this counter every day instead of going to the library or sitting at my own desk, so I can keep saying that this is my job. Who am I kidding? I love everyone I’ve ever met. I may not remember their names, their faces or meeting them at all, but I’ll fucking love them anyway.

Anyway, I am drinking my coffee with a straw. I have finals next week. I scheduled a hair appointment with Randy from Trade Secret, my favorite drag queen &my favorite hair dresser. If I am going to put my head in anyone’s hands it will be that man. See, my heart is up for grabs, I’ll leave it on the counter with donut crumbs, but my hair, oh honey my hair, you’re going to have to wait more than a minute or a second or a year, you’re going to have run your fingers through it for the rest of my life. That is true love, that is what true love really is, you can feel it stop, you can’t wash it out, you cant wash it out, but you can knot it up, you can ravage it to all hell. The jury is hung and the house echoes now that they’ve gone. There’s a place for all of you in everything, especially the scripture that you read to your daughter every night, but baby, please, stop making these man made lakes, I can’t see the moon, and all I need the water for is washing a hunger-strike out of my hair, I know you think the time has come, but I’m not ready to let you watch me drown, God says he is going to stop building men with eyes that work that way.




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