WHAT OTHER MOTIVE BUT AN IMPURE ONE Some dude on Cawson thought my hair was yours So I wrote you a letter months ago It sits in space untouched I’ll tell you right out of the gate That yes I have tracked you But only the way I track everyone Gently, warmly, sadly lit So when the fearsome red letter things happen I make sure I know of it You’ve floated around for years Behaving like me in a parallel reality If my parents had been younger or maybe divorced, If I hadn’t been an Only… Only once did we ever mingle air in the wild Marginal parts of a sheepish assembly in his basement I slung my legs over a dingy armchair You fidgeted in shadow with your rolling papers We all watched a movie where a guy had a secret What other motive but an impure one Made him ask me into that space Like he drove me years before to your cul de sac His “safe place” my ass Some kind of psychological warfare of which I didn’t know I was a tool And who else had he brought there To taunt you with headlights that skimmed your bedroom shades I’ve been taking a fresh interest In the kind of Japanese horror Where cute caves into something sicker Than most people could conceive I'd wager you like Tarantino more than me I like Todd Haynes more than you And if we went out together We’d settle on Hausu Just found a spot where four years ago You’d joked about time and futility Then I looked down remembering my sweatshirt Said, “Existence is Futility” I never regarded you Without him as intermediary Distortion on the mic he hogged And in the folds of that raggedy index card All I know is when I read your grown words What I see seems to be what I get And when I read his grown words There’s at least seven layers of bullshit Queer as we were, the three of us Still spun a binary ballet Steeped in the walls of sorghum and wheat That’s all we could really see My partner says this kind of invention Is wish fulfillment and sort of silly He’s right but that won’t stop me Nor does it make it any less interesting

WHEN I FINALLY SLEPT WITH YOU We were both distracted The mortal tug lured us early from opposite sides of the bed Back to the comfortable empty search And everything that seemed to work so beautifully in blueprints Had no center, no real stuff A bland ego trip Like the time on Broad City When Ilana essentially fucked herself Or Nick Cave’s matching luggage On an aimless carousel

THE BOOK You had your own book of leaves and grass And you shook his self-loathing from the roots Freudian fascination from the roots Midcentury madness from the roots Suburban clusterfuck from the roots Red maple crumbles, moss, hand mirror slivers You didn’t wrap it up in plastic, no You let it get everywhere like holiday glitter Look at us now, we’re effervescent Sliding spectrums Specimens with thrift store flair No kids slung on our hips No choking on noxious loneliness We won Aside from the fact that we aren’t friends But some dude on Cawson thought my hair was yours