I Marinate, You Masturbate

You say “fuck you”

with all the elegance of a blunt knife —

eighteen times a day, seven days a week.

It’s your native dialect.

You use it when you stub your toe

and when you lose an argument.

But I mention masturbation —

twice —

in a poem

written in the mirror of men and women like you,

and suddenly your linguistic diarrhea

starts foaming at the mouth.

Something in you twitches.

It howls — what the fuck? —

but you can’t quite find the words,

because your profanity

is the background noise of boredom.

Mine is punctuation —

salt and mustard,

to marinate thoughts

your asshole would shrivel at the nightmare of.

You can throw a mouth

and the whole of oral hygiene under a bus,

for a night of pointless conversation 

and faked validation, if not faked orgasms.

But dare I say cock, ass, balls, or pussy —

and suddenly your panic gets political.

Your fragile-ass morality

starts clutching at pearls made of cum-soaked scripture.

You scream

Genitals aren’t literature!

And I agree.

They aren’t.

Genitals are biology.

Just like words are etymology.

Just like pronouns are words.

And yet you —

you have turned them into gender,

then turned gender into gospel,

and then dared to call it grammar.

What you speak,

I can’t write.

What you want me to write,

you wouldn’t speak.

And yet —

you call yourself

the judge,

the jury,

and

the fucking verdict

of verses you don’t understand

by people who don’t owe you shit.

You want my rage without my lust.

You want my trauma, trimmed and typable.

You want my filth, but bleached.

You want my voice without the moan that birthed it.

But fuck that.

And fuck you.

I write with my fist,

I spell with my knuckles,

I edit with the hard-on of my inheritance.

And if my poetry makes you squirm,

remember —

it wasn’t written to keep your legs closed.