COCAINE
last night I had a dream you offered me cocaine
and it’s funny because cocaine is like
one of three drugs nobody could get me to do
and also you yourself haven’t even done drugs,
even pot, for like the past 10 years
or something crazy like that, and in fact
the last two times i got stoned you were there
and I felt your sobriety like the outline
of an anvil that never quite came down
and I’ve only seen cocaine one time
in person, so when you pulled it out
of your pocket in the dream it was just salt
in one of those bags they keep spare buttons in
when you buy a sweater. I did a line
but don’t really remember the sensation,
or any sensation, just myself asking
if I did enough or too much, thinking
to get out my phone and google it
just as I was waking up,
how I woke up with heart palpitations
and that delicious impending doom feeling
of my forthcoming orgasm for you in my stomach
and all day I’ve been thinking about what it means,
my head swimming with the symbology of that weird sacrament
and all of the ways it was shocking,
that you’re good for me or completely terrible
and it changes depending on what I want
you to be and how it’s so much of both,
how in the dream there was this other guy there
who was also supposed to be you, I think,
and I felt the sting of his disappointment
long after I woke up and how neither of those yous
are you so I guess they’re me.
i spend so much time trying to editorialize
the contents of my chest, pick apart desire
and go crazy trying to catalog
its weight. like if i pay in shame
for all of this adoration i’ll stay sober
in its hands because it’s fucking easier
to be in school than to be responsible
for dealing your own tough love or worse,
not. last weekend at the peak
of that edible, i was fucked and i wanted you
to judge me, didn’t recognize the pure intrigue
in your voice as you asked about the shapes
on the inside of my eyelids. i wanted you
to frown at me and be like CUT THAT SHIT OUT.
i wanted you to roll over and fall asleep
face down while the room spun around me, your body radiating
disappointment and bad vibes. i wanted you
to wake up and tell me how dumb i sounded but you didn’t
and i keep losing my place in all this
but the point is i dreamt you offered me cocaine
because then i could wake up and hate myself
for this racing heart and dime-sized
pupils and being so wound up I’d fuck
a piece of furniture and cum in five seconds
just thinking of the way you smell.
then afterward i could be hungover
and tell my bathroom mirror reflection
I did a bad thing again, verbally
bop myself with a newspaper like a dog
and then for good measure I could
message you and you’d yell at me but you
won’t, you’ll just tell me you’re happy
I’m happy, like some fucking sadist
and fuck you for that.
-
Kat Giordano
INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY OF A NARCISSIST
1.
He says he would kill to be this young, still undefined,
the ten years he has on me still spread on my apartment floor
like an empty map. He hurries to fill me with himself,
taunting, and I open for him, do what I always do
when I meet someone who gawks at me like a glass chandelier: forget
that a narcissist can only ever love himself, that I am
just a box of dirty mirrors.
2.
He wants me hanging above his bed like a row of paper dolls,
childish. he’d have me groan as he skims me like an ala carte menu,
folding back the parts he doesn’t care for. My joy
bores him. My confidence disgusts him. My wholeness
disappoints him. He resents wanting me when I’m like this:
solid, no cracks for the light to pour in, no way for him
to gaze longingly at his own face.
3.
Still, we were friends the way damaged people are always
friends: ships refusing to budge as they pass in the night,
our hulls scraping each other, fetishists
for the way the paint flakes off before it hits the water,
never to be seen again. Another chapter in this lesson
I fail over and over, not ready to live without it.
Who are we if we don’t leave these bruises on each other?
What would we have left to kiss when everyone walks away?
-
Kat Giordano
