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?

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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.