Something naked this way comes;
it’s your desire, and your fantasies, and your beautiful,
vulnerable questions, sayang.
They say just a little too much
about what is growing underneath,
drunk and moist and redolent
and yet, incidentally, not exactly fraudulent;
just a little too naïve, a little too hyperaware that you might be
indecent, when it never has to get that deep;
when we could call it innocent, instead,
or in a semi-approximate state of undress.
We could call it a tendency to appear
irreverent, when all one might be trying to be is
ruddy, clever, steadfast, even gallant—
and you know the colonials, and those in power
would never allow it. That the way you grow, slender and tall
makes you ripe and juicy, and oh so ready for the market
and one is such a succulent—
some people aren’t buying it.
Even if might be real,
they’re just wading deep into the loam of your heart and mind and soul and body
and waiting, ever so delicately
for the tides to come rushing in.
Are you ready for what they haven’t ever expressed, though?
You and the rest of the undertow—
you know what it means to not really what to play to win.
You knew that it’s not necessarily survival of the fittest—
it’s only a game, and an island,
if you only have just two choices:
sink or swim.