The Acid Test: Advice to My Daughter

When you have broken from this parental sac,
And stretched your limbs out
Far to touch the regions of the world,
Your mouth will become sandy with all the Sahara deserts,
While your skin sweats with the sheen of melting glaciers
Eaten away by the big-mouthed rays of sunshine,
And soon the men who claim citizens to no soul,
But to every beautiful body, will flock around your faded jeans.
You will believe you've been worn out by the world and
Every step you take digs deeper into the earth, but no,
They will know. That way your eyes shine with your
Half-hearted innocence and your body practically floats above them.
And all they will know is lust.

Do not trust them, my daughter.
With your all-knowing tongue which leaps
In circles, you will try and tame them,
Make them jump through hoops and riddles,
And they will comply.
Or so you will believe, but your heart races
At their electric touches and soft kisses,
You soon wish so much for their attention
That they've loaned you that you forget
The reflections of lust beneath their eyelids,
Pupils drooping lower and lower, running over your
Surfaces like a surveyor of a landscape soon
To be developed. But mere feelings will
Envelope you with your hopes that your thoughts
Are their own, even as their vices overflow
Across your body and soon you are left naked
In a country with no name, in dirty sheets in that
Placeless place of being totally and hopelessly,
Alone.

Their tongues will be sweet to taste,
Sweeter even to hear, and as your lips
Draw their words up to your mouth to drink,
You will find yourself intoxicated with those compliments that sparkle,
Shimmer so brightly that they will lead you to the fate I've set before you.

They will play guitars with nimble fingers and downcast eyes,
Or hide behind their trumpets and empty pockets,
Or even slouch over the black and white,
Which once so braided me as the immovable piano vibrated,
But the song will just be another sound,
Strewn across the ears of women in multitudes,
Angels like you sewn with strings memorized
For times like those when buttons crawl off their
Hinges and jackets slip onto the floor.

These men will shift their shoulders and knees,
Accommodating to the foreignness of your body,
All movement and touch so electrifying and blunt,
As they crave your dancing flow. Every piece of you broken,
Displaced and compared between him and you,
Two differences made up and beautified.
But it ends again in the same, with emptiness.

I see you staring, daughter, into my eyes,
Which were once as blue and bright as yours
But now have blacked with age and disappointment.
And yours asks for a world where love grows
Within the core of your artificially flavored fruits,
Or hides in lattes and beer bottles floating towards
Our feet on the ocean waves, before I say that love is something
Dreamed, or never existed at all.

No. My teeth have never felt the croon of that lie
Slip between them.

All I ask is you first lay flat your soul,
Across every inch of his universal being,
And if he clings closer to that place,
Breathing each unique spore and letting them bloom
Flowers in his lungs allowing them to lunge and learn
His oxygen, and finally all you are is vital to his very
Existence, then your weeds can pull him closer to the garden
Where his own love was grown inside those hollow floaters
Caged and protected by your smooth ribs, and
That kiss will prove your internal cries true.
There is where I found what you will search for and,
Perhaps, so will you.