Slices
A woman, eventually, will sit beside me
and — with a dying kind of innocence — she’ll ask
if I’ve ever loved.
And I’ll say yes.
And that I never will again.
She’ll get curious, of course, and bother me profoundly.
And I’ll be forced to summon the filthiest metaphors I’ve got:
That love and hunger are sisters, one leans on the other.
We love and go hungry, and eventually,
we hunger for love.
This poor thing who sat by my side
will come to see I’ve starved before.
That now I feed
on poetry and back-alley philosophy.
And then, poor soul,
she’ll have to answer me this:
how could the one who came before —
who ate every last thing I had —
still died of hunger?