You Animal

Love's a matter of chemistry,

sex a matter of physics.

You ignoble beast with your shaggy mane,

talking dirty such twisted didactic speak.

You lay low and curl your paws against the muslin velvet of your northern lakeside wealth in the heat of summer,

and nothing, nothing can slay me.

You, Eurasia.

You pretend you're a minutiae of substance, deny what I think:

you're really an idea, spreading sweetly across the cosmos.

You tell me I love you,

call me a scoundrel.

I'm a woman and I can't think clearly and I'll never be the bad boy as you were on the playground in the playground days,

we'll take shots with each other in metaphor under the moonshine, and shots ring out as loud as they were in the heads of war-fed youths.

Your tanned hide is matted from trying to drown. You're repulsive, you're glorious,

you swear by your solitude and insist on disparaging emotion.

You walk the edges of the water of Elysian sunsets,
ever to hold, never to tame.

We'll grow old and what then, my friend?

Too proud to surrender our skin to men,

too weary to look each other in the eye
across the torrid water.

In the dying heat of the evening,
in my arms, a dying breed.
That you may one day
disembark.