Fox Frazier-Foley: You’ll Worship at the Damaged Altar
Troy Dyer, Reality Bites
Lost as a boy (vulnerable) (troubled)
(genius), buried as the city, dire like a wolf:
the most romantic thing I’ve ever
done is fuck you without a condom, deep
inside the winter of our discontent.
I mean, I want a man who thinks
that maybe he’s a man and feels too many ways about it, intellectual
heir apparent to Shakespeare
by way of Steinbeck—anyone’s
telephone call an occasion to express a general
tendency towards existential dilemma. I want
someone who’s suffered the loss of his family
unit via divorce, who understands pain
and therefore won’t want to inflict it
on me. Right? Someone who understands
the death of the father as more than literary device,
has felt love
pink the void when your person disappears, and that person
would not deliberately leave me alone
exactly in order to hurt me. Right? Although he might
take my graduation tassel and pitch it
off the side of our city’s tallest building. Yes, I want a man
who reads Nietzsche, because at last
someone else who reads fucking Nietzsche, perennially
backlit by ocean in the docudrama of my brain, stealing candy
from the bourgeoisie & sullenly defining irony
when I pretend I can’t as a way of asking
for his love. My love, you’ll break
down over me eventually, and the fact that you took the time
to insult my dress will make it a greater
triumph. You’ll worship at the damaged
altar of this torn & lacy dame via just one
mis-sung & who wouldn’t
catch a bit of fire when you block me from the doorway with your body? Who
wouldn’t want to be the replacement
for your late (lost) (dire) (buried)
with a skull kind-of God? I do. I do. And so what
if eventually you’ll try to kill me
with that disarmed expression, your last-
minute taxi running outside my door?
Fox Frazier-Foley is a monster made of fire. This poem is from Let Me Wring Your Heart: Love/Hate Poems for the Vulnerable Troubled Genius Boy, which interrogates literary, cultural, and cinematic tropes from 1990s US culture and is currently seeking a publisher.
