Shame's Provenance

With its highly practiced line of chatter –
consummating every promise of each prospect
it engenders merely through the slick
deployment of a faintly vulnerable tic that flicks
a little muscle in its cheek –
conveys the charm, and chic,
of something possibly covertly “weak” – and which
appears to put the lie to its surpassing savoir-faire –

oh, don’t go there.

It is a lump, its life is little. It’s a bit
of spittle on the lip of a leviathan belligerently
unaware – and lacking any inclination to pursue
it here or anywhere: it doesn’t matter what it
ever wanted or, quite frankly, that it is,
at all. Emptiness behind another
(ho-hum) fall –

Daddy’s narcissism,
Mommy’s unacknowledged rage,
or someone’s (we’re not saying whose) small dick?

If only it would really make you sick,
instead of quickening
and thickening.


.