1
I never stopped blushing after you said to me,
“You might just be the man I marry,”
when we were in fourth grade.

And by blushing, I mean really blushing
like a white-boy Dizzie Gillespie
blowing hard on his trumpet,
cheeks all puffed out and red-faced,
holding one note for over five minutes.

But I didn’t care
because I might just be the man you married.
It was the nicest thing any girl had ever said to me

But after you changed schools,
I realized that we would probably never get married
after I got your number from Lisa your best friend
and kept calling,
and your father explained to me what a restraining order meant.

But I never stopped blushing.
It became a problem.

2
I never stopped blushing and
they started calling me “beet face”, “beet boy”
or simply “the beet,”
which by 6th grade had morphed into
“blow me” or sometimes “Haywood Jablowmi,”
and by 8th grade ended up being some variation on
“you red-face cocksucker”
and that was just the teachers.

My parents took me to doctors
who kept shuffling me from one specialist to another,
as there was confusion over whether my condition
was vascular
or dermatological.

We even tried an exorcism.

In the end
my mother painted me
every morning
with concealer.

I ran away when I was fourteen
hating the smell of concealer.

I’ll spare you the difficult parts.

3
To this day
I am still blushing.
Everyone thinks I am an alcoholic
and it’s hard to find a job in sales
when your face is always flushed bright red
like you were mainlining niacin -
it tends to distract the prospect from the communication
of your unique selling proposition.

So I’ve became a clown balloon twister.
I make little wiener dogs
and elephants
and balloon hats
using all red balloons,
and it is ironic
that I paint my face
just as my mother did,
something that my therapist,
who is a strict Freudian,
is convinced means that I desire
to perform erotic acts with my mother,
which he describes in great detail at our sessions,
telling me it’s solely for the benefit of me
understanding my unconscious self better,
but nevertheless has turned into a niche bestseller that is
#3 on Amazon’s list of Erotic Literature/Incest Fantasies.

4
I am blushing now
thinking
if I only knew where you lived,
but I don’t.

Maybe someday I’ll get a phone call
for a party and it will be you
there at the wooden fence in the backyard
letting me in and telling me
in which corner of the yard I should set up,
but you wouldn’t know me
as I’d be dressed in my clown attire,
but I would know you -
this is called an information asymmetry.

5
Maybe I would throw you in the pool
and attempt to drown the both of us
saying underwater
“You scorched all of my promise bitch!”
“You scorched all of my promise bitch!”
but you wouldn’t know what I was saying
because we’d be underwater
and it would all just sound like
underwater talk and bubbles to you,
but as my painted face melted off
you would know me
and see how I am still blushing
if you weren’t blacking out.

But that’s not really like me.
I’m not the vengeful type,
and I am like a cat in that
I hate water
and purr when food is set in front of me.

And it’s too much like something
in a made-up, silly story.