Last Night I Dreamt of You in Denmark

as you exited
onto the stage, dressed
in your best Italian
garb, your slender body
expressing traditional mating rituals
from centuries before
your time.

I watched without
being able to touch you.
I watched your beauty, the way
your chesnutt hair pinned
over your head didn't move
as your arms curled and your fingers
squeezed the air, the way your breasts lifted
and settled
as your feet fluttered and shuffled
to the music.

I watched and I waited
and I clapped. I wanted to catch you
like a butterfly.

A Second Date After Two Years

He brought us the bill and she said
are you going to be hetero-normative
and I said you were too slow
as if speed has anything to do
with history, equality, oppression,
traditions of pay, etc., as if
dating is a competition and I wanted
to win, as if the prize was two swipe rights
and a match on Tinder, a good make out
session in a manual transmission car
in the dead of winter MN.

She came back from the bathroom
after two years and called the NYTimes
crossword on my phone scrabble.
She actually called it scrabble and then
she said I was an English lit major
but I'm no good with words. No shit,
honey, and I'm a CIS male
hetero-normative misogynistic asshole.

1000 Tunes In

Sometimes we get drunk and tell
our problems to each other
and what do we expect?
This is just humans
connecting. This is just the need
to go beyond the surface, to say
I'm having a shit time,
will you listen to me?
-
Then I lay in bed at night reviewing
the plays, scanning for errors, looking
for praise, evaluating the worth
of an interaction and the next day
at breakfast as "just a few memories"
comes on, I paint the evening
with a nostalgic brush, one without detail,
one big swoop of the bristles.