I can taste marijuana on the tip of his tongue.
And his nose ring was cold from the Melbourne winter.
I can trace ribcage under his skin, moving my finger
across his tall stature like a pen that an artist pushes
against the outline of a statue of a stick-man
that stands as a skeleton in a modern art
exhibit. I stumble to find words to press out
of my lips but he catches me off guard with a
“you’re cute,” and his weed-flavoured tongue locks
with mine. And I try to hold instinct at the back of my throat.
I question, in my head, how genuine his desire
of my aesthetic could be, and if it were perhaps the
spliff he had lit hours ago that was drawing a cloud
of drug-induced disillusion. And I had been smoking
disbelief since the day I knew what a mirror meant.
And how I would fit inside it. And how it showed me
a difference of what people saw of me. And how smoke
married it to cast a trick on me, make me believe a
distortion of me to be truth. And I still smoke that disbelief,
to keep me in line, to keep me in place, so that I do not
step in the path of Adonis, and the beauty he carries in
his stature. Or so I do not cast a shadow on skeleton
frames that defy gravity. Sometimes, I fear what my mirror
shows me, and I shrink my thoughts, hoping my body would
mimic. Other times, I learn to accept the image, and I
smoke the disbelief on instinct when he tells me i’m cute.
I cannot, or refuse, to grant him an acceptance of what
he sees in me. And I expect ulterior motives to crawl
out of his ribcage and skinny fingers, through his paper
pale skin. I still taste marijuana on the tip of his tongue.
