Jack Scott writes

An Expensive Date

You're an expensive date
high in your gilded tower.
For your perfection’s silken hours
I must toil long in cotton fields,
one of many prices I pay for my desire.

Ah, semantics!
Do I merely want to fuck you
or make love where none exists,
to camouflage as passion
what is really lust.
Tongue-tied ardor,
this self-deception
impaled upon the tip
of tangled mind.

You are as irresistible as breathing. 
You make my liver quiver,
and prickle up my pulse.
I clench my breath
and sphincters
at your approach.

I live, I love,
lovers, hand in hand,
those words.
I walk and talk,
I breathe the air,
and gulp the water,
all much like you: necessity.
I can’t resist you
though that thought’s too often
your reluctant surrogate.

It seems a bribe’s in order,
so I will tender
from my store of volumes,
unwritten on my shelves,
a Dedication, yours.
If I don’t now begin
 to write this poem for you
how long might I procrastinate
by endlessly composing titles?
 I’ll call it simply “You”
to get it swiftly underway,
but get caught up in imaginings:
acknowledgements and credits,
Preface, Foreword, Epilogue -
all substitutes for actual writing.   

How do I love thee, I begin,
let me count the way. (I jest.)
At once, I’m stuck in lust,
imagining your cunt,
while staring at my pencil,
rigor mortised writer’s block.

I know what all writers should
about the pencil’s other end,
the manuscript’s unwriter.
I’m a charter member of the club
who knows books aren’t simply written.
We should be called rewriters.

Will this be biography of us,
or my imagined future memoirs?
That will depend on whether
you will play the role I’m writing
in this poem of ours, for you.

So I continue to recount
our ups and downs,
but always on the level.
Though I may exaggerate,
I would never lie to,
though not about, you
so you should believe me.

Now, I’m done,
I’ve finished it.
It’s ready to exchange
for your affection,
this product of midnight oil
and neglected days,
this heartfelt incantation.
I’ve had it bound,
so be impressed,
I beg you.

You take it in your hands,
accept it with a word or two,
thank me with a smile,
then riffle pages
forensically
 as if to see
if banknotes flutter out.  

Is this the smile I’ve longed for,
slogged toward for so long?
Now it seems a billboard,
wide and not too deep
with cow fields just beyond,
real cows in them.

I could point out
the parts of speech,
define vocabulary,
parse every sentence,
disambiguate uncertainty
ending with the epilogue,
bookend echo of the preface
sandwiching typography,
meaning’s clothing,
if that would enlighten you
or unburden me.

I could,
but it makes me shudder
to be made to tell
the meaning of
a poem or a joke
when you don’t get it.
I’ve done my job;
that should be the end of it.
Why should I dumb myself,
because you refuse to smarten?
God help me big time
if this ever need be done
for a book-length book.

You held it like a brick,
my opus one, my baby.
My offering was, to you,
homogenous
as a block of cheese,
hors d'oeuvre to nibble on
while in conversation
with your more cultivated friends.

One of a kind,
this rarest opus,
though meant for you
and given,
an unsought gift,
is not lost to me
and never will be
no matter your disposal,
for it remains etched
within my memory,
so I’ll stick with
the woman I created
once I get free of you.

I bit my tongue,
held all this back without a word -
I fear  I’ve used them up,
beguiled with you, a butterfly,

I’m now wishing for a pin,
Would you be better
dried between some pages,
of maybe Elle, Vogue or Ms. -
or would I keep you in a jar?

One more thing in closing,
another lesson learned
about myself
and others like me who’re
prone to fall in love,
it’s easier and cheaper
to rent a real whore.

 
 Portrait of a Man Writing in His Study -- Gustave Caillebotte



A Portrait of Tuna Writing -- Kari Sagal Allgire