Whorecrux

My heart

Is a cookie today.

I break it up into pieces,

Dog biscuits, if you will,

And I toss it into their

Open frothing mouths.

I hate how easy it is

For me to give away

pieces of my heart.

To the girls who compliment my outfits.

To the acquaintances who say nice things.

To people who hold the door open for me.

To men.

Oh, men…

Men are complicated

Oblivious and ambivalent.

They kiss me, and they think

they deserve a piece of my cookie.

They’re entitled assholes,

Who think all this breaking and tossing

Is a sign of weakness.

That all the pieces I give away

somehow diminish my capacity to

love a future man

(with the oblivious assumption that it must be a man)

Men are oblivious to the fact that

I give them a bite voluntarily,

That a bite makes them hungrier

but me stronger, and fuller, and harder to destroy.

Men put pieces of me up on their refrigerators

like souvenirs from the country they just conquered,

But really they’re just Horcruxes;

A piece of my soul that remains immortal in their memory.

Men think of themselves as powerful,

But I only think of them as pawns,

As portals into so many lives that could’ve been,

As stories, memories, fun times.

Did I ever tell you about the roof? The park?

The elevator? The second elevator?

The two floors in the same building? The cave?

The frat house? The bisexual? The college classroom?

Did I ever tell you that you mean something to me?

And that is why I give you a piece of my heart,

But don’t take it to your head please,

Take it to your own heart.

And let this night be a memory and nothing more.

Let this night be a story my body tells years from now,

The neat trick I learned from the guy

with a master's from Cambridge?

Let this night be ours under the stars,

A crumb that you savor,

Let it be a piece of a cookie and nothing more.

Take my heart, but don’t let it validate you, please.