The Reason I Won't Let You Touch Me

The reason I won’t let you touch me

Hands groping through the dark for my innocence,
Virginity
And I wonder sometimes why the hell I’m waiting

I sit there silent on the bleachers
Spiderlegs bare under blue shorts,
Waiting –
Girl asks me if I like to sing.

I do, but not here.

What listen?

I unplug my world,
White umbilic wires reaching from one soul to the next
She hears five notes,
Hands the broken stopper back.
Oh I know that song, she says
In that tone that tells you
You need to catch up to get with the game.

Her voice was rusty.

They look up to see me,
tossing me the ball
with all its pressures, defenders, lovers
and I fondle its lines and release it
wondering, as it passes through the net
why I couldn’t keep it

like I can’t keep my mind
when your fingers breathe down my arm
or I can smell you under Axe
and day old cologne

They want to keep me here.
What reason?
Male. Sexy. Athletic, that’d be good. And tall.
Definitely tall.
Needs good English, too.
Is fucking any fun when you don’t talk?
Don’t ask me, she’s the one who can’t speak it.

Va sorry?

Am I deaf?
Or does the cadence of voices
And the secrets passed from breast to hip to smile to eye
To mind
Fall on a blank wall?

A woman –
Girl?
-just walked by.
Too perfectly round to be fat.
Whore, they called her. Slut. Bitch.
We all play the game,
But you’re only labeled if you get caught
(and it’s never the guys who do)
It’s such fun to dance around the pill
Jumping next to the tissues and loose change
(just in case he forgets to drive you home)

It’s up, and BAM
They don’t get that I win every time
(when you’re a head taller who can beat you?)
Yet all I get are stale words of praise in my own tongue,
Maligned with disuse

…so why do I feel so alone?

The boy came to borrow the cello
And the voice on the phone told me
To take him under my wing

[But I blow through the reeds
Like blue wind
Resonation was never my strength

I don’t do strings
They tend to tie your soul around the bow
And your right hand has to keep secrets from the left]

I told him to read this piece.
It’s in C, it’s easy.
You know it, I’ve heard you sing it.

I can’t play it, he says.
I can’t read the notes.
I forgot the tune, so I can’t pick it out.
I can read the words, but I have to play down here.

But I forgot to tell him
you can’t play harmony unless someone else plays the melody
but nobody can sing around here
and my voice didn’t match the cello
so I still don’t know if he learned it

That day the bow made the strings sing
Through sawed rust
And I watched red flakes of music drift past
While dreams of dandelion hands wreathed my wrists
And the song slipped flatter and flatter
Like I do down the wall
When your hands cup my face

Double barriers
Were never easily overcome

And this is why I must retreat
When you push your body close
If it were not for this
I’d suck you in-

Speaking in tongues was never my gift.
I left that to the preachers and poets.
Speaking in speeches ties me tighter
Than after you give me that look-
There’s a mind in this body
That’s trying to speak
But your tongue keeps getting in the way
(and I try not to swallow mine)

Two bodies can join like puzzle pieces
But two souls cannot –
do I have only the corners?

And now that you’ve caught the imprint
Of the mind that haunts this corridor of a body

Will your fingers still run like shadows over skin that has never seen day?