I want to write about you, tell them how good you are
Seated on the stool beside me in this old seedy bar
Where I feel like I’m the only one here on Main Street
As you dip me in dance-sway, swinging low on my feet.
And your wife is home waiting not knowing I even exist.
You tell her you’re working late-early to cover our tryst.
Even to my husband’s mind I work long for me and him
So he thinks nothing of my telling him, “I’ll be at the gym.”
The kids know no better since they have their own lives.
With need for money, your car and someone who drives,
Kids take your cash and don’t care much for your advice.
They say you don’t know their friends or music or minds.
Now you and me we have something surpassing it all.
We have heat and steam and fire inside the hotel walls.
You toss me and I stay flung while you flatten me in bed
And not a thought of her and him or the kids in my head.
There’s my coat, my hat and my shoes for running home.
Here’s my panties, my shirt in the dark room on my own.
I have nowhere to go, no one to confess my lover’s skill.
I walk home alone, buy me a beer for something to swill.
Life as a cheater, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a drunk
Hiding secrets and letters and love inside a rusty trunk.
Lonely as queer loving hags like me with no way home,
We tramp from room to room taking any a tossed bone.
Out of lies and tired of deluding yourself with lusty love,
You leave me, pretend your shiny life is high and above.
But you and I both know that underneath your floor is rot
And grown in the cracks of your loined heart a mossy sot.
So give me your number and tell me your name, my dove.
Show me your smile and your ass; I’ll take out my glove
And wind up my arm to let fly the anger-ful powerful sting
For love is a splendorous obsequious onerous ugly thing.
In the gaze of the other 
For love is a splendorous obsequious onerous ugly thing.
Indeed
ow – I was hit by a truck when I was 13. I lost my memory, did not even know my own mother’s face. In the light of my own demise, each love is a mountain climbed, there can be no failure. Each one a victory in my life, even among death and loss I feel only the joy of what I have come away with. Even if my friend’s girlfriend, another man’s wife.
Perhaps knowing how precious my time is, knowing that time is about me, I cannot fail. Love in any case is always a victory when the tally is made and the bill paid.
A great bit of writing, deployed with a European sort of sad, emotional ending that endears you to the writer, could be Chinese as well.
Thanks, Jim. I like that: “each love is a mountain climbed.” It certainly ain’t easy. What does it mean that love is a victory when “the tally is made and the bill paid”?
OMG I remember know thinking after I got my memory back how many women I might not have had sex with if I had died. What kind of kid is that I don’t know. But I was obsessed with my experience with women, they were all around me.
That would be a 13 year old’s preoccupation, lol.