Circe

I am not beautiful

I am a goddamn motherfucker

I am a goddamn motherfucker with boils on my face

I am a goddamn motherfucker with boils on my face and I pick at them with my own two hands when I’m nervous,

I’m always picking with my own two hands

I’m a goddamn motherfucker who isn’t beautiful, dress myself up in silks and short skirts and passerby will wince

I don’t walk like I’m goddamn beautiful, I walk like a motherfucker,

The kind of motherfucker who doesn’t want to be looked at but is also angry

and that angry radiates like heat on asphalt, and makes passperby wince

I give kisses to cats

I give goddamn motherfucking kisses to cats

And neither me nor the cat are beautiful

Both of us are half-hairless and lacking a pure and perfect soul

The cats I kiss need their fingernails clipped, I need to stop clipping my fingernails

Both of us wash ourselves with our tongues and look at the hair we shed like we didn’t do it

I am not beautiful

I haven’t cut my hair in months but even if I did I still wouldn’t be beautiful

Even if I cut my hair I would still be a goddamn motherfucker

Even if I knew how to contour and get nice clothes from the thrift shop

To be like the girls with the metal glasses and the big patterns smoking cigarettes outside the sex shop

Even if I had metal glasses and big patterns and bummed a

cigarette outside the sex shop I would still

be a goddamn motherfucker

who kisses cats.

#poetry