Andrea

She’s thin as a berry branch,

runs wild as a vine,

barefoot, a dryad of the woods,

face immersed

in two palms full of feral fruit.

The seeds merely propagate

more of her free spirit,

their tart chomp, their untamed mastication,

fuel for her half-bestial pleasures.

She’s never to have a child,

her soil not to be sown,

nor sprayed with rain,

nor baked into another being

in deft ovens of sun.

For no man is rashly tender enough for her.

No man can both run with the hare

and den down with the fox.

They’re too inbred with the machines they drive.

They grip the wheel with less than human hands.

Her tears are raindrops on a quaking leaf.

Her expressions are technicolor.

Her eyes, piercing, unknowable,

make the world safe for a singleton.

The Only One Who Didn't Make it

You keep tabs on the guys you went to school with,

but from a distance – there’s money in between,

smarter clothes, fancier cars, bigger houses,

and if trophyness was a word,

it would apply to their blonde wives.

Some were smarter, some got lucky,

one or two were born into it.

The best you can hope for is that

their business goes belly-up

or they have a stroke or get cancer.

For the only chance of parity these days

is as if they come back down to your level.

You don’t have it in you to get ahead of yourself.

And there’s always the chance that you

could lose the little that you’ve got.

When you’re drunk enough, you convince yourself

that they’re no better than you are,

and besides, there’s always someone in the bar

who’s so downtrodden they make you look good.

When you’re drunk enough, he’s you.