Defense Mechanisms
to A., for our millennial twenties
Besandaled, you burned up the Bush years
and the sub-prime crisis without denting your wallet.
Your father footed the overhead
for the handheld device in your back pocket.
Pressing its buttons set your face aglow.
I was your live-in, on-call, tag-along dildo,
dysfunctional, tailing the comet of you through
the cordoned boustrophedon of an airport queue.
Sometimes if I behaved and asked politely,
you let me have your cunt and eat it too.
So what did it matter you touched down to sell out
and dig in your heels for the bonus and raise?
Jakarta, Lagos, Stuttgart, Bogotá…
You hit the ground running. I was just a phase,
fat to trim, clutter on your desk space,
preoccupied, unemployed, paranoid, bookish
and spineless, disappearing in a cloud of ink.