What Returns
       

So now winter is a place I visit
but don't belong to. I pass the time

in a room that isn't childhood, but
does that matter? My mother

is still down the hall & I am still
watching men on screen break

into other men & the once-snowfield
of my body becomes a flood that shatters

me each night. I thought I was finished
with desire & what a relief. To not want

to reach outside the skin. To touch
what isn't mine, or anything at all.

To not be a tongue in a glass jar
in an ocean. But the pills make me

dream in oceans. I wake up crusted
with someone else's salt.

I become a boy who touches
the backs of strangers' necks

in public—in love with the soft
of his own throat.

This makes every man
on the train into something

that could kill me. Don't worry.
That's a good thing.

It means I got on the train.
It means I still have a body.

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Copyright © 2016 Cameron Awkward-Rich All rights reserved
from Sympathetic Little Monster
Ricochet Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission