Sometimes I can feel myself leaving this space 

Lifting to catch his summit

Listing hundreds of reasons that are pulled from my lips like man after man 

Candy is the word for it-

The candy your mother tells you not to take from strangers 

Only for you to grow up and find comfort in strangers

The same way you found comfort in her shadows, 

In strangers there is no memory, no friendship to tarnish with your touch. 

In strangers you find an absolute

An impersonal reassurance- 

There is no friend I can see as a man in the ways I need to see him; 

Detached from myself 

Incomprehensible to one who has come to learn of men through me

Instead of reflecting my hatred for myself in the ways his biology asks for me to touch him-

Can I unlearn all the ways to touch him?

If I asked him if he were an object 

He would begin to introduce to me a deeper knowledge of him than I could listen to 

Before calling him friend, 

If he asked me the same I would quickly agree 

So that we might be more like letters instead of men. 

He talks about the age of consent

As if I could ever consent to the ways he could perceive me-

Thoughts have no barrier like touch,

There is no way to consent to the wanting of myself

No way to deny their self-proclaimed right to quietly fetishize and fantasize 

Out of shame for what I am,

This candy he compares getting my consent to taking from a baby,

The candy I never wanted the taste of 

Once I learned you can never rid of the taste of men-

As if I were something more and less than man in a more shameful way than gods were,

As if the venom down his lips was from hunger from something inhumane

As if I were candy