TFLN Poem - Bidet, Breakdown

Hey.

Here's this week's www.textsfromlastnight.com poem.  Thanks to Stacy Keele for helping me pick one this week.  There were a bunch of contenders, and they all seemed so good.  She went with this one based entirely on the Austin area code.

And then I went with it, dove in,  free writing, and it got dark quickly, as it always does.  This template fascinates me so much.  I love dramatic narrative poems.  How does a person get to where they are based on where they've been?  What has altered them?  What are their stubborn, deeply held, sometimes absurd beliefs?

Here we go!

(512):

I can't decide if I'm depressed or if this is just what life without a bidet feels like.

Hitchhiked all day until I ended up in

Cedar Creek.  Harder than I thought it’d be.

Torn up coke can hidden on the 110 came up quick

Through my black converse sneaker, slashed up my right

Heel. Stuffed some pages from my dream notebook into the shoe,

Pressed it down, flagged a trucker. He exhaled gunpowder

And runny beer. Sucked him off.  Eyes closed, brutal, efficient.

I hadn’t showered in seventy three hours and six minutes.

Did he, did Thomas ever love me?

Did he watch me sleeping, morning come morning

Studying my face until the lines grew wrinkled

And make an algorithm in his academic, tidy mind

Exactly when he’d cut me loose, find someone firmer

And more fun?

He was so goddamn proud of that bathroom.

So cosmopolitan, he said. So civilized, with ionized water

To clean and hoses to treat your tender, soiled self.

He would call me his little bidet

As he gently pressed me down and held his

Quickness into me.

It was  - I just used to find it so charming.

Then I looked it up.

The French.

It means pony.

Some dumb, helpless animal you ride.

Not even on your level.

That’s when I felt the walls in my heart

Tremble, and a hammer appeared in my hand

And I took to the porcelain

And screamed and screamed

Until there was thick, chalky dust and Thomas found me in the rubble,

Slapped me to the floor, kicked me til my blood pursed through my coat

And he sent me running.

Keep telling myself: the pain, the transitory friends, the bottomless cask

of suffering,

The mottled love, the resonating, sin-swept bones,

The chapped, bitter flecks of cum on my teeth were temporary.

But the work, what’s made – what’s sheltered, won’t be taken.

It will keep.

It will keep me warm.