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