Marvin Gaye Wants You To Want Him

Tepid champagne giggles over ice but I didn’t
I didn’t have any curdled milk to throw over the ashes
Where? I had a story, but
No
Break, now, break
Because no one cares for you when your heart beats shudders through cowlicked spiderwebs, and because the bard got away with it

You didn’t mean to shrink at the hunchback’s touch
But he never was a little girl
And though you read breasts and a bleeding abscess in the mirror
Neither were you
The little girl who swallowed flowers and bred an entire colony of bumblebees in her thoracic cavity

No one is, was or ever will be a walking hive shrinking at lashing petals
But you hurt his feelings, and so he punished you with honeycomb fingers round your little pink neck

So we shun him by the lamb’s blood on our doors
But he smells our fear in the flames licking the effigy and sees the terror in her fishnet throat