AFFINITIES

For women with borderline

personality disorders and

sociopaths

Who enjoy tormenting

their men inside and outside

the bedroom mostly

Where intimacy, another

affinity, slips away quietly 

through cracks in the walls

And floorboards, hangs

in the cobwebs in the corners

until swept into the pan and tossed…

For sweet summer oranges

dripping their sticky juices

into greedy hungry fingers

Whose wetness, if not licked

right way, turns into a mucky 

adhesive that makes 

The skin stick together,

two, maybe three, fingers at a time 

until they are washed clean…

For the wet lover who pulls 

away the belt and says, “I want 

to feel you, taste you, I want to eat

you alive, I want all of you 

inside of me where no one or nothing

will ever tear us apart.”

For the crimson and scandalous

yellow roses pulsing in

fragrances that dance 

Like short summer skirts through the nose

open to the hot wind, and the breeze

the cool ocean breeze…

For oak trees, kestrels

vulvas and breasts

and the creek

Where water this late 

in summer doesn’t usually 

run but today it does…

For cold dark beer

and warm dark women

that go down easy

as the wacky Sac girl who, between breaths

says, “I love the way your cock feels 

getting hard in my mouth”

and turns her

garden into a thorn

patch asking for kudos…

For the howling grief

of a mother who 

loses her baby

And would tear

her heart out of her chest

if she could…

For the skittish survivor

who remembers nothing

of her childhood

Whose love is marred

by the shadows of

men whose faces she does not know

Or wish to remember

whose father is a fugitive hiding

in some dog patch in Mexico

And makes his living

smuggling porn videos

into the poorer neighborhoods of Africa.