the nail shingles

standing next to you in the subway this afternoon, I looked over your shoulder and saw a scribble on your leafy, brown text-book page. is it healthy to be jealous in the event of a relationship? your cursive hand, coal black ink, outlined in varying shades of pencil gray, made me think of your reminiscences. in what event were you jealous? who have you loved? what made you love? did you lose the one? the one you thought was the comfort-rendering, potion apothecary, belching and bowing in the valley, in smokes of love, tears, and rough allusions of an insidious heart-crackle? i kept looking at your face, the flowers on your ears, gentle, red and ashamed. tracing an outline of your pale nose, your fluffy nostrils, a bounce on your mahogany curls, a slight convexity rippling across your lashes, i felt a fullness tingling on my nail tips, manicured in oil and animal wax. over and over again, like a dead poetry automaton, i asked myself in molten visuals of the anthropomorphic. a monstrous jealousy, a heinous hideousness, a hindrance, perhaps, to judgment, to understanding, to the width of tolerance, clouding over and over again the logicality of thought. the rationalism of unwariness and over-exposure quenched and bleached in pre-suppositions, in hatred, in a wringing pain of imagination, a modicum of peace; broken, and shattered in a billion flecks. in the cave of a pessimistic hallucination, shrouded in doubts, conceptions and a make-believe reality. is it healthy, to be jealous?

in conflict, of course. how does it feel to think, over and over again, this person you are with today was a utility, used over and over, in consensus of course, in different homes, in different rooms, settings, feelings and scents. the thought behind thought of the sexual deliberation, the exposed encounters, philandering, mongering, haggling in pleasure, squirming with lust, writhing in slime, twitching and beseeching, craving the plenitude of checkered erotics, swelling with arousal -the orgasms and fetishes of the wing multiples, the anti-traditionalist in whoredom, in what we call sexual experimentation. in the multiplicity of experience and the need to establish the temporariness of your encounters, i am to gloss over your historical biography, apparently, of being passed around, homeless, on beds of peers for fun flavors. to dissolve your past night stands in my mesh of ignorance, and pretend, over and over, and smile, over and under, as you continue to talk about how they fucked, casually, nonchalant. how drunk you were, and high you may have been, when you experienced your most intense orgasms in the dank, steamy, red rooms of ballet and weed. how you interrogated and eye-flicked, posts and posts of seemingly quiet professionals, and blew them in their hotel rooms, no strings attached. the novelty of room service, to overcome the threat, to give in to the rage and cold, wax and wane of hormones, emotions and desire; scarlet, ocher and diffuse. loosening your genitals, little by little, in sync with your host, in shades of craze, your thumb prints, toe art and lubrication. and while you fucked, bolder and bolder, your teeth clenched, your fist pumped, your face crimsoned and seared with the warmth of your body pulse, you released and wrote your story. your multiple facades of sexual experience, the pinnacle of your pleasure, your gratitude or ignorance of peeling ignorance, fading shame and dying doubts. you did as you pleased. in experience of humor, it felt so good. no strings attached.

narrating this story of sheer utility, of your uninhibited feeling of control and empowerment, of your juvenile crush on and violent sex with the person i hate, the person i beseeched but never had the chance, and your humor about your promiscuous life, leaves me dry. for my understanding, it is not an insensitive issue. it is not about the number of your past encounters, in hundreds i presume, but the casual tone around your storytelling drives me to a point of anger, where i cannot maintain my calm, i cannot uphold my smile, i cannot cherry-pick a cosmetic calm. to ask me to be in love, with the object of use, is jealousy healthy?