Darius Stewart
G.T.B.T.P.
Grab them by the pussy . . . you can do anything . . .
—Donald J. Trump
now imagine them are young boys
who might encounter an old man who’s lost everything
youthful beauty his pride
but not his joy in how
he covets them wherever they’re going
jogging past his house in the hours
before sunrise arriving home from school
after a clarinet lesson it doesn’t matter he’s there
circling the Exxon parking lot
waiting for them to emerge one by one
from buying slushies or Snickers bars
to tide them over until dinner waiting
for the one boy especially to detour through the alley
shortcut to finish homework before
joshing around outside with the rest of the boys
before dark signals him back in
for bed this is the boy the old man seeks out
most the boy he fantasizes seduction
as he sits alone in his bathrobe looming
a bachelor late in life
with all the fixtures of solitude detrimental
the way he adjusts the draped bay window
in the den feverishly lurking through it
while he slurps down cold brown tea
places the cup back on its saucer
without a trembling hand not a drop spilled
not an eye averted diligent to a fault
& when did all that start the million stars vanquished
one evening the million reasons
he fell out of love with appropriate love was it
the eventual silence of arriving home with only
details of the day having wasted away to greet him
at the door or was it simply he wanted
a boy who would lay beside him a while
a boy to undress by layers like an onion peeled
down to the gleaming smooth skin beneath
the boy’s arms crossed over his chest the way pubescents
prove a budding masculinity legs propped
on a foot-rest head tilted to the ceiling
like poster boys of the old man’s youth though
not the baby-faced dimpled ones he prefers
ne’er-do-wells known to subvert the law
scarred expressions of the wily
already lighting fires to dumpsters
behind convenient stores pitching bricks
through windows of abandoned houses
boys needing the most rehabilitating
he wants them reduced to basic parts
two eyes a mouth jaw nose & torso
all of him tinged or not so long as a boy’s
clarity of beauty remains comprehensible
in other words a boy to whom you can do anything
Darius Stewart is the author of three chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful (2006), Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He earned an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, and lives in Knoxville, TN with his dog Philip J. “Fry.”
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