The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Nerve's TV blog: We got an idea for the L Word spinoff! Plus: Who Would You Rather? The Closer or Saving Grace?
POETRY
posted 4/1/2003
My last girlfriend broke my bed. Yes
we were having sex on it, and maybe
you think I was at least half responsible,
but she was the one who liked to drift
up into the corner of the padded back
where she'd spread her arms like a queen,
and all I could think of was the man
who sold me this fifteen-hundred dollar
sofa-bed, warning me never to put
extra weight where the head should be,
which was exactly where our bodies were,
humping the morning, she in her
careless abandon, me unable to get
the octagonal rims of the salesman's glasses
out of my head; she producing
lovely, husky groans, me listening
to the complaining of springs and joints
and hollow chrome. She would have
scolded me for such a concern —
a piece of furniture compared to living
in the moment, the pleasure of a woman,
a woman who was, after all this time,
adjusting me to intimacy, wanting me
to connect and come, though I didn't
see why this all couldn't take place
a few feet down and to the left.
Soon it wasn't happening at all,
and in the end I found I could tell
her everything except this — better
to have her think my head was full
of other women, or baseball, than discover
I was Felix Ungar guarding the coffee table,
ready with a coaster to ruin his life.
She left me with a convex bed. I sleep
as though on a boulder, feet and head
lower than my chest, listening to the traffic
on Greenwich Avenue, which never stops.
