I am behind bars at the bar,
parading myself like a prize at the fair,
but my intended audience is never there,
just this one guy, with grey hair and grey skin who always wants to buy me drinks,
fumbles his fingers across my pendant and mumbles pedantic, pretentious nonsense about how his soul is pink,
printed with my name,
and my eyes go on a journey from his smug face to the back of my head.
He tells me that my beautiful eyes are wasted on the beautiful girl across the room (he uses a slur to describe her, but I will call her beautiful),
and half of me thinks he’s right,
because me having a flacid fan club around me all night seems to have given her the wrong impression about who I am intending to attract,
and then I am right back where I started from,
night after night,
bored to baby blue tears as he babbles on, despite my blatant disinterest.
I have been polite,
and I have been puerile.
I have said it in so many languages to try and show the girl across the room that my tongue is cultured and intelligent,
but she can’t hear me over the blithering idiot that haunts a home he will never belong in.
It doesn’t matter what I say,
because he sees a pretty dress as a pretty clear sign that I’m just “going through a phase” and he sees himself as some kind of King of conversion therapy,
(It is just a piece of fabric, and he is just an unnecessary man…)
so he persists, undeterred by my constant resistance,
because the world has always belonged to boring men, so he doesn’t know any better, and women never know their own minds anyway, according to his phallic philosophy.
Sincerely, Jennifer x 