Poem: "Why I’m Not a Good Lover"

when I was a kid

I would swim to the bottom of the swimming pool

and attempt to clutch the sandpaper bottom

so as not to float back up —

“hold your breath in like houdini” —

and I could do it

if I were under the diving boards

at the 90˚ angle

where my dick could push against the cool water spout

and even then, it was great and lusty, a little bit of jouissance for a squirt like me

— excuse the pun —

and then

at the last second,

with a burst of superman

energy

I would kick off

and feel the rush of virginia woolf,

the expectation to break the waves,

a kind of insane desperation —

and it was kinda fun

in those days,

to play that game

in its different variations

and I feel that way now,

hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool —

and it doesn’t help that I’m reading ballard’s novel about boy in a detention camp —

pushing off with my planter wart soles

thumping my chest against the harsh water molecules

desperately —

and I don’t use that word lightly —

to get air

and it isn’t like when I was a kid playing

frivolous games in the lukewarm pot of summer vacation

and I know why I feel this way

that I cannot get air

because a word that comes to me repeatedly

— and you have noted it in your scrapbook —

is “bereft”

a past participle of bereave

and I cannot stand to lose you

that is it exactly

so I feel bereft

and that kind of feeling is too much like swimming up for air,

isn’t it? —

I mean, the time it takes, to kick up from the bottom,

to the moment a mouth kisses air —

is a wide expanse of time and space

and I am afraid of being alone, but pushing you away is all I know how to do

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Poem: Against the Bed Board

Against the Bed Board

Against the bed board, it is painful;
Eyes water, the video screen fuzzes.
Fixated on a controller,
It erases the pain—
I am in the zone.

I am bored; I really don’t like video games,
But I play them anyway,
Fixedly,
Like a hurt that is better frozen than healed,
A steak better wrapped in the freezer than brought into the sunlight.

A steady gaze that rather forgets than remembers,
Rather lies arched in piqued degrees of irritation.

© Greig Roselli

2007

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Poem: "Disclaimer"

No need for grey-eyed pity,
but my father never taught me how to shave

left me like telemachus at the plow

white lather rinsed sink swirling pool of saliva and babe,
kicking my little feet in the alabaster pond

in the center room where draped greenery was

i would watch him tracing long traces across his body,
especially his face

he may have pretended once or twice,
sliding a plastic covered blade over my skin

to joke

but that was it;

the split memory of childhood

left in solitude to handle my own adolescence;
shaky questions during sex,
much less know the simple hygiene

and i still

wince

at the drops of blood, spread evenly,
like a red crescent

every time

as if i will never learn to do it correctly
as if this solitary life is forever frozen
over a sink of running tinged vermilion water

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