Reek

By the time I learned to walk I didn’t want to be human,

ice cream carts and Coney Island notwithstanding.

I longed for my original state as spume

and other immaterial things.

What they took for nakedness here I took

as poignant tells. They saw it in my aura.

It warned not warmed them

and they looked away.

They couldn’t bear to be witnessed.

I bore it for them and was raped and abused,

not because it was my lot but because I was not

one of them, no matter how hard I tried to be.

I could not get in the bone, the marrow,

the emptiness.

I would always drop my ice cream cone,

stutter, say the inappropriate thing as if

I weren’t speaking to them at all, but to you

indecipherably, making a report to dark masters.

I didn’t want to be them, to warm my hands

in their clubbiness. I reeked of what I’d been