45-Year-Old Teen Idol (Jack)

All these crowded rooms, noisy with old New Wave, sticky with cotton
candy cocktails and you. You with your salt & pepper pompadour, sun
sparkle eyes of kiddie pool blue, argyle socks sandwiched between denim
cuffs and Chucks.

I am too old for this. And drunk. From here it’s just acrylic sweater fuzz
and egg yolk stains and flat pillows, but, oh, oh, just this once, I want to
run my thumb across your bristlecone pine lashes, thick and brushy and
soft, kiss the vinyl margins of your eyelids, pressed together when you talk.

We retire to a porch swing with a Wurlitzer wheeze; share a cigarette in
the tropics of November. You serenade me with obscure break-up songs
from no-hit wonders. The smell of your hair, Suave and smoke, reminds
me of someone I thought I loved, a long time ago.

Sitting next to you I notice the weightlessness of your body. Your paperwhite limbs,
how my fingers fit the grooves of your ribs, the adolescent birdness of you.
I want to catch the tip of the knob of your nose between my teeth,
eat it like a mushroom. It is the only thing human, fleshy about you.

Tonight, I know, you won’t break my heart. Instead, tiny needles with
diamond tips will perforate the surface from the inside and it will burst.
Burst from it’s own blood weight – a heartthrob – when both of us insist
on being at once beloved,
and unlovable.