A Question

Will men always ignore the girl who doesn't throw herself on him? 

Will men always choose ho first? 

Will men always be blind to quality? 

Or will I have to dangle legs, and breasts, and a phony smile- to get you to see me? 

Don't you ever wonder if those skinny every-man-done-already-had-that girl gonna give you some *cough* kinda something, something needing a doctor?

Don't you ever get tired of a woman with a practiced smile and a string of scripted conversation that reads off like a page in some magazine? 

Don't you ever crave some real? Some real?

Some

real sweet, real tender, real tough, real hard, real strong- 

like can back you up, rub you down, hold you up, make love to you, make you more honest, call you out on your bullshit, bring you a dinner plate, laugh at your jokes, not laugh at your jokes, stand and testify- Yes! You are a man!

Will I always watch the pass around girls find it first, and then find it first, and then find it first again?

Maybe I'm not being honest. Maybe I should look at how I play perpetual mouse. 

Mouse. 

Making mouse-y noises in the corner while snakes move up to my cat. 

I had dreams, I tell the corner. I had dreams of warm lighted dinner tables where sons and daughters fought over chicken until the boom of a father's bark decides what went where. I had dreams of soccer teams, scraped knees, and Lamaze classes. Sunday barbecues, jazz vinyl records, old punk and lost ska spinning in the afternoon. Sprinklers and rose gardens and lemonade, homework, and acne creams, and blushing sons.

I had dreams. 

But I can't make myself pretend I'm week, and they can't bring themselves to want depth. So, the good Lord has seen to keep me here in my corner.

Or maybe I'm kidding myself. Maybe its that I've been too damned marked by the ghetto for cats.

We don't get braces- we get food stamps.

We don't get car keys, we get vocational training.

We don't get dreams, we get tired feet.

I was-ah --should-ah -- was supposed-ta

and I didn't. With every breathe in my body I didn't.

The sweetest reward for escape. A lonely life, and

I wove those old dreams into a quilt 

and pulled them over my head

to warm me

there,

in my old corner.