my existence is threaded like a limp-wristed friendship bracelet,

if I stop presenting myself as something to be ogled,

something attractively sexual,

I cease to matter.

if I continue walking the road, the path,

men hold their expectations, and I come off

aggressive

when I tell them it ought to be okay that I don’t want it.

the sex, the thing people crave more than oxygen when they stare at me.

because what am I offering beyond a body

and a thing that could never be limp.

I am the nuisance, the bother,

when I confess my sexuality isn’t a condition

overwhelmed by trauma.

you ought to be unique until it means you are unwilling

unwilling to fuck a man senseless for his ultimate pleasure.

you see the men you could have sex with in other lifetimes,

but in this mind, in this body,

the things you feel drawn towards,

inverted Toot Braunstein—look her up

are the things left to be an afterthought.

if I exist I exist as afterthought

I exist as question mark confusion mark

send him to the sex therapist, Mark

I remain valid on the dating apps where people who validate me are

four in the state,

seventeen in the country.

love is like hoping for rain on a planet that has not defined the word rain in its language yet.

who will want me while the world sees me as broken…

 

 

I was talking to a friend about how the only times a man has given me head it has felt like just teeth. The feeling of his whites on my dick. ‘Did you not feel pleasure?’ comes like a baiting question…if I felt pleasure maybe I wouldn’t be sitting in the passenger seat of the car telling you, reminding you, that I don’t want some stranger to drag me into the bathroom, pull down my pants, wait, unbuckle the belt first then pull down my pants, and put his teeth on my penis.

​

I like to examine how I talk about my sexuality. Or I don’t like to, but I must, to course-correct when I snap someone’s head off instead of, I don’t know, inventing an entirely new personality and just going about life as if I was ordinary. I must examine how I talk about it, because often enough I find myself frustrated in how someone will react. You say, ‘I don’t do sex,’ and they think you’re just a side. You say, ‘no, I don’t do anything sexual,’ and they think you just confessed to being a celibate monk somewhere high enough in the mountain ranges to have lost the ability to feel pleasure entirely.

You’re alienating yourself for speaking, and you’re alienating yourself for not. Flirt with a man, he’ll give you ten lashes for not wanting to take him to bed—but the lashes are not physical, it is something like ten weeks or months of barely giving you the light of day, or ten weeks or months of him thinking he will be the one to change you. Tell a man outright he won’t have any luck with you, any luck in his pursuits, he’ll think he is being laughed at. ‘Is my dick too small?’ No, I’m looking for the unattainable.

​

Looking for a man who will understand me, but not reject me eventually for everything another person can offer him. In the dating market, I am not worth money. Not worth the dowry. For all who call me handsome, who call me interesting, smart, valuable, to them I am also tame in the bedroom, or a stray kiss will turn them on too far.

‘Can you at least stroke my cock while we cuddle?’

why the fuck do I speak.

​

​

​

- Keeley Young