"For Tabitha"

A poem for Tabitha, my ugly, beautiful audiologist.

Tabitha is my audiologist.
She finds more sex appeal in my inner ear than any set of
six pack abs or bulging biceps.
She stalks my auditory system and revels
in every infection, quirk, and cholestatoma
to take root since my youth.

She's not beautiful to anyone swimming in the shallow end.
She has skin like a seventh grade science experiment left
unfinished and festering in the sink.
Her eyes are sunken skull deep to the bottom
of her ocular ocean floor like battle ships
shot down by the Pearl Harbor attack that was puberty.
Her hair is like kelp, slick slimy vegatation clutching secrets
and pirate treasure to her scalp.
And her smile is dangerously misplaced,
like an assault rifle in jittery junky hands it hits holes
in everything except the target.

But I cling to the car crash of her conversation
like the mustard stain stubbornly stuck
to her poorly buttoned blouse and I foul-tip every
high pitched nuance of her cat-in-a-blender baritone.
She is a shattered stained glass window and I
love her like a freshly dug grave.
I'm the dank earth eveloping her horror in my arms
with a passion that confuses anybody outside the six-feet depth
of this desire.

She's a rafflesia arnoldii, a beautiful big bloom
boasting bright petaled perfection passed over by scientists
who catch a whiff of the stench and write it off as a
"stinking corpse lily" letting the deep end go un-swum
by anybody able to tread water.
But I'm drowning in Tabitha's disaster,
letting the maggots of my adoration
blossom into a swarm of jet black
six legged compliments.
Their compound eyes are confounded,
and I'm bugging out over her.

Attracted for no clear reason,
I randomly vomit sentimentality and she stares laughing
at the misguided affectionate messes on the floor.
I hack up "you're beautiful"s and spit up sentimentality
like my heart has acid reflux.
My imagination hop scotches the line between
romantic and revolting
living perpetually in the middle of both lands.

Seeing a love story more powerful than Romeo and Juliet
in the most morbid of places like the cockroaches
in the dark of my home using my eleven pm pantry
as a bumpin' night club awkwardly lap-dancing on a
liquidized digested fruit loop.
Or the mental patient proposing to his girlfriend
by spelling out "Will You Marry Me?" her December snow-doused lawn
in his own urine.

Or Tabitha, my Jackson Pollock princess,
my dream riddled smoking by her jittery gunfire smile,
scuba diving the wreckage of her sunken ship eyes,
weaving through the thick kelp of her hair.
analysing the long forgotten data dancing in the seventh grade
science class sink.
I am six feet deep in adoration,
desire blossoming like the Rafflesia Arnoldii flower for
this shattered stained glass window woman,
this mustard stained dirty blouse beautiful mistake.

Tabitha is my audiologist.
And she thinks my inner ear is sexy.
She's not worth the time to anybody swimming
in the shallow end.
But I am drowning in the Tabitha's disaster,
sucking in the stinking scent of a Rafflesia in full bloom,
And for her?

I'm all ears.