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She’s traded in her sexual curiosity to be an exhibitionist, and, why? Because she’s operating in an either/or supply/demand economy, or so it would seem, if tits on legs are to be believed in like truth. After all, she’s not even an advertisement for the anonymous. Of course, she can’t be looked up. She just wants to get it over with. Hence, the parka of her pseudonym, Mrs. Pappadapalous. She knows you’ll go for that, especially when your summer body is trapped in the winter of self where words are free to fuck without crumbling the monument of the body, though enough stalactites drip up to the stalagmites when she takes her sweater off to reveal the first few digits of the phone number like a need to fuck in the dark.

So she comes out swinging, protected by bouncers, bounces, bargaining from a position of strength, dressing her naked beauty up in the clothes of desire, and because she anticipates his reaction (“honey as a sauce to sugar,” gag! “I’ll stick the bill in your g-string, but would never date you; though marriage is a possibility, concern is merely earthy and probabilistic”), she’ll render her body somewhat unattractive, but functional. Such secular humanism! Such mechanics, not even a national treasure, Nashville Pussy, the most special of Olympics. Curled up volcano holding its nose to go headlong into that final frontier of harsh commercial otherness, not as a punk of the hardcore armory might, the rockets read glare, she swallows the sea she is to double the droplet of bad religion he sees her as, what need for any gender bending but “come and get it” spoken by international waters in a language where even they are gendered male.

Each revelation of her body another glass ceiling surmounted by the past looking straight through the present that paws it (with its intellectual dickies) to remarry the future it had only divorced for the alimony of pathos and dread, the playfulness of that, from the perspective of the horny stone she staged. But there was nothing to back up her words and so she shook ‘em silently to oohs and ahs she craved to be disgusted by, for even at their ugliest she bested his most sexy—feminism hadn’t yet gone as far as to grant women the camouflage of the female duck, but then that was men’s fault for cutting their hair and running back to the blue and brown of Wall St. or the social poetry biz---promoters, all! The vicarious thrill of pimps and talent scouts, maybe slightly less repressive than the family in spreading a tablecloth like a bar called Cheers, but still at odds with the “lazy” ambitious tension one finds in the streets of whistles and cat calls. When would it grow up? But she was beyond such feminism, cunning past man’s thought, at least, maybe maples, and thus was not only the hand that pulled the penis and the eyes that made me dance lonesome naked in the mirror (to see), but also the ears that got my hands to play piano not just for themselves but for the sake of the ears too, and this always took a while, which is why the one hour man had to be conjured from the minutemen always too small for her, however well equipped.

All this without even the version of a polite (thus condescending) peck on the cheek known as pulling up her shirt and bidding 2 honorable mentions suck, while the grand prize settles for tulips, and what of the face men, the dark pubic hair-that-goes-up-to-the-belly-button men, the brunette ice men Neanderthal? What courtesy could be spied in them to implicate them in Project: Mersh if not the bloodbath, afraid of the anarchy that needn’t be molecular or atomic, much less universal or automatic, to seethe as their cells, whose poverty was their porousness, a police state you might say, the caller ID assumed.

Out with the rascal, the pervert, normal ain’t natural and we’re convincing ourselves we’re naked to prop up the industry that looks so good on paper (downloaded) it must be porn (sponsored by Coors) for desire may be back-channeled and thus lapse into demand, but need, as lust, can only be broadcast prime time baby and then she can put her clothes back on and sit shyly at the bar because “speak softly” is to “she needn’t have a mind that speaks on a level considered male” what “carry a big stick” is to the performance she “gave” to witness, seeing herself better in the drooling gawks, presumably, than she ever could in the kind of words that do not refer to her desire to break free from them, these self-contained, posthumous elegants whose “lyrical” abstracting she poses with her elephants. It will undo him, if the third girl is to be believed and not that voice which says “In the third world, then, there is no pain,” admittedly, to be fair, before the cold war began, but still, and women have babies men have shit. Women have shit too, but for them it’s more like the meaning of horse in an age of cars than say in Richard III.

How to reconcile the sense of increased conservative repressiveness felt in the last 30 odd years with the abstract sense that women have come closer to equality than ever before without having to point out a possible causal connection between prohibition and women’s suffrage? Oh, guttural girl, I’ve half a gang to mind you! And I know I forgot your lesson.

Matriarchy grounds all men for affirmative action reasons, as I listen and listen to the criticism in her poems and willingly cast my own into the role of a secondary, unreliable, source, or the kind of poetry that gets derided as criticism by those who see criticism as only worldly power, and thus impotent, as if it is the city, and not the brain, that’s wider than the sky, and she plays that role, fulfills that need (for me), for what seems to be her selfishness is her generosity. If this brings us back to the old interior paramour, fine with me, anything to rescue from the temptation to be rash, blow the cool while she the candle, for I don’t have to become the oppressor to see she’s not. I may have to pay the price for putting so much trust in her that I become vulnerable in seeing her as more distant than she seemed before I opened up to her when, in reality, she may have actually nudged a little closer. Rising expectations is a problem to meet in both love and money, and the present poetry promises may very well go against the commercial and ideological habits of society, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sell it too. Why not? Especially if such an urge can both a) keep me from wanting to call her when I know he’s there and b) keep me from wanting to buy what others are selling, and, if taken to its logical conclusion, I may even get a purple heart (or at least blue balls) for bringing down the market economy with me. So go ahead, call her repressed, that’s why she invented hippies and punks. Okay, I’m not positive, but it is suspended. Court adjourned, froggie. And, you, well, the less said the better.

 

 

 

hmmm. methinks my centerfold is repressed….

 

chris stroffolino