Barterhouse: Echoes Of The Unlaid

Had it not been

for the sheer inability of heterosexual men

to find their way into a woman's insides

without turning into hollowed-out echoes,

accountability might have been a non-negotiable

one couldn't barter away on the hopeful premise of sex.

Perhaps then, 

a woman's promise of access

would have stopped buying exemptions.

Perhaps virginity 

would have lost its exchange rate.

Perhaps the boys would have learned

that being wanted does not make consequence optional.

And maybe, just maybe,

all those boys in men's cloaks

would have stopped sounding the same;

all appetite,

all grievance,

all convenient innocence,

all discovering principles

only after being denied what they wanted.

The unlaid were never the tragedy.

It was the bargaining.