poem of the day 11.11.13

humiliation

i turn back awkwardly

arched back

to grab a stone white door

when this ten year-old girl says

shouldn’t you be protecting those things?

i don’t know what she means at first

but then the other ten year-old girls start to giggle

and i have my suspicions

i mean, like, you know, like girls protect those things?

and there it is

ripped to shreds by some pre-teen wench

some little brat who doesn’t even have breasts

picking apart my man boobs

to another chorus of laughter

and it would so easy

so very fucking easy to crush this kid

to point out her natty. yellow teeth

tell her no boy will ever love her

with those natty, yellow teeth

that no dentist from brooklyn to l.a.

would be able to fix them unless they were a genius

then start in on her friends for their elf ears

their own buck-teeth and flat, sexless chests

but i’m the adult in this situation

and if one of these kids start to cry

if one of these kids storms off to tell her mom

it’ll be my ass on the firing line

so it doesn’t matter how humiliated i feel

how much i want to recoil

the last bits of me from this mortal state and die

i just shrug

i tell the girls i have no clue what they’re talking about

while they continue to laugh at me

while i walk away resolving to toss this shirt

this navy blue waffle shirt

that my wife got me two christmases ago

because i liked it

because i thought i looked good in it

finally looked good in something

burn it in a funeral pyre with those other bits of clothing

that made me a target in this place

the powder-blue shirt that larry said made me look fat

the green shirt that my supervisor said made me look homeless

let them all burn

shirts and pants and jackets

white and light colors

until my closet is exorcised

until it becomes a black void of fabric

that i’ll wear like some brooklyn hamlet

to hide the madness and self-loathing

the man boobs forevermore

protecting myself from the mean little girls

and everyone else

an entire planet of flesh and blood and bone

and little else that i’d hazard to call human

on my most

generous days.