now, they are purely girls

when i was 16, my boyfriend
said he liked girls who were simple.
i did not know what he meant by that. when i asked my mother about it,
she said that simple meant someone was a little gone in the head,
that the screw was
not loose but was already strewn around obscure places
like forgotten car keys, that the light bulb was running short.
short of what? expectations, cunning,
snappy retorts. because of that definition, i thought i
was simple because i liked complicating
things- putting mustard on pancakes, mistaking the moon
for jupiter, reading the newspaper upside down. once,
when we made a trip to the city,
i caught my boyfriend staring at a billboard. it displayed a model
whose lips looked like two fire hydrants
squished together. she was not wearing a
shirt and her legs were splayed into an open parenthesis.
so this is what he meant by being simple, i thought
to myself. I was a bit disappointed when
we drifted apart after that.

but i swore i would never be simple.

at 20, my college boyfriend said he liked
women who were nice. i wondered what he meant by that.
so i tried to act nice. bake sales were nice so i held them
for orphanages. everything was labeled ‘for the benefit of’.
I even worked for mr. petrowski, who was really old and
spat at sunbeams gliding across his
wooden floor in the afternoons.
i adopted stray kittens and did not pick flowers from
restricted areas. but johnny, he broke up with me after 2 months,
6 days, and 2 hours. he said i didn't nurture him enough
and that i was always too busy with my charity work. i didn't understand
what he was saying but he got me at nurture though.
i was, by now, afraid of words that were too reliable to have any kind of
character.

but i swore never to be nice again.

at 27, my lover said he preferred women
who were straightforward. He said he would get
a hooser thinking about women who would
do what they said they would.
I wanted to be that kind of woman but i couldn't
shrug off the image of
my aunt's show dog, the one she couldn't
stop feeding strawberry crackers
to. so everyday, i told him how
i felt about him, even during days when i thought
he was nuts and deserved to be in a straightjacket.
that went well for a time but
after some months, his face took on a sallow, empty
look, like he's been held in prison for years. ten months and he was
running after some woman who had never wanted him anyway.
he was a kite, flying, disappearing into the stilting
blueness of his new apartment.

so i vowed to keep my opinions to myself.

i've changed so much over the years that i feel as
if i've shrunk. sometimes, i believe that i am the size of a
well-reared mouse and i am reaching for something,
a piece of cheese perhaps or one of those celery sticks
but i end up with my hands as empty as
a bell jar- always lacking, always
guessing where is what and what is whom
and why is this what it is and why is that
a never or a nowhere.
these miscued words are
mazes, puzzles, someone’s unfinished needlepoint.
i am gliding through them,
pretending all the while that all the other roads lead
somewhere else other than here.

or maybe it was my choice of men
that did me in- men who could not stand up for
their ideals. somehow, if i am
not simple, or nice, or straightforward, i am no longer what can be
categorized as a counterpart, a rib,
a reservoir that can nurture and
build. but now that they're with women who are fancy,
who are sentimental, who are growing thorns all over their bodies,
i realize that the ideals they paraded around me
were mere hoaxes,
like fairy myths or santa claus. they put
these impossibilities close to their breasts
like steel armors to excuse
themselves from being wounded or from bleeding.
everyday, they burn uncertainties.

but all these fears confound me.
i wonder why when they love, it is
never as simple as boiling a three-minute egg,
or as nice as an unassuming child,
or as straightforward as freedom.
love always has to have a thorn, a perpendicular rainbow,
a hurricane, a mountain made out of beeswax
or else it will not do.

this is actually the reason why i live
with sandy now. i sleep as naked as a jaybird
and even snore at times.
somehow, this is comforting.