in the holiness of my first communion becoming
my favorite sin, aka the blue pill/red pill scene
in The Matrix aka aka the moment I both found
and lost my virginity on the floor in front of the TV,
Neo and I uncovering our worlds’ master
deception simultaneously.

I want to kick
Propriety out of my apartment.
She always talks about herself
in the third person, and likes to hang
sunny motivational posters around
the house. When I sneeze at the dinner
table, she says, bless you, and I want to
grab her by her straight, clean hair
and ask who she is to bless me.

I want to run
a background check
on Lust and let her be my roommate
because of all her priors, not in spite of.

I want to kiss
the trail of droplets her wet hair
leaves on the floor each morning as
she runs from the shower to her bedroom.

I want to wade
in her discarded fruit roll-up wrappers and cups
of applesauce. She leaves the honey out,
with a spoon stuck in it that she licked,
and it all turns hard, crystalizes in the jar.

She doesn’t mind that I take all my clothes off.
I feel most like myself when I’m naked.
I like myself the most when I feel naked.
I’m not sorry that I like you better when you’re naked.

She goes to arcades and steals tokens
from strangers’ pockets, she goes sledding
down hills on plastic meijer bags
that rip in half at the bottom, she collects strangers’
luck and brings it home to me in a glass jar
as brilliant as a thousand fluttering fireflies.

She sometimes leaves, but she always comes back,
and I let her lay her head on my pillow,
run my fingers through her hair until she sleeps.

When I am quiet, she says,
cat got your tongue?
I want to give the cat my tongue.
I want the cat to teach my tongue Spanish.
I want someone to ask me what’s going on
with the cat and I want to not explain a single thing
because he has my tongue.

I do the laundry but throw in a red sock so it all
comes out pink. I am learning how to undo
every blessing that was forced upon me,
greedily hoarding all the “take 4” cards in a game
of Uno, shuffling the deck myself. I’ve never wanted
to win a game if it means having just one card in my hand.

Me and Lust have capital Good capital Times.
We take second helpings of everything,
we fill our pockets and hide extras under our lips
like children hide chewed broccoli mush
to spit into the toilet.
We spit everything we don’t like into the toilet.

I put all our time into plastic bags, tupperware,
freeze what doesn’t fit for later this week,
store things under my bed, under my fingernails,
under my underwear.

When I sneeze at the dinner table, she
gives me the finger and says pass the salt.

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