I wrote this in 1996. Who knew it would be prophetic

Confidence Man

My confidence man is tall, he is golden and he is beautiful, I have gone to sleep at night with thoughts of him lulling me and keeping me up at once. My confidence man listens to NPR

on Saturday and Sunday mornings. My confidence man blushes when I talk to him

sometimes.

Sometimes when I cry late at night, listening to songs that coerce thoughts of love and sex,

I conjure up an image of him sitting on the bench in a tank top and shorts hanging low

on his knees. The shirt is white the shorts are red. he is sitting on the bench next to a

basketball and he is chewing gum and he is wearing shades. And he moves his ball out

of my way when I come to sit down. Only I don't sit down.

I stand there and he's got laugh lines around his smile and very white teeth as

he says, "Suit yourself." But he wants me to sit and so pulls on my hand until I come

down next to him.

And then the bench is in my living room and he doesn't want me

to sit down next to him anymore. He wants me to wrap my legs around his waist

and he wants to hold me like that as long as he can without... It's like Mercy. It’s like we’re playing Mercy.

Will I need him inside me before he needs to be inside me. And he makes an

off-hand reference--the answer to the Joker's riddle in an old Batman comic--

and I get it and I laugh.

And then we are in my bath tub which has grown by definable leaps and bounds.

and he has asked to lick me dry and he has made me contract and expand, sink

down in violent shivers. We are damp as he sings me to sleep.

And then I am awake in bed and he is trailing his warm, dry hands down my back

and over my legs and he isn't touching me there or on my nipples either because he

knows I am sensitive afterward. And all I can say is I feel peaceful.

And then I knock on his door and he yanks it open angry with me for making him

want me so much and he doesn't bother to excite me, knowing this excites me, and he

 pushes up my skirt and presses into me so that I can't breathe anymore, I couldn't argue

if I'd ever even wanted to.

And then we are in an underground club I went to in Virginia, the one that was an

atrium cut into the back of a movie theater downtown. I am dancing and then he is

dancing there next to me. He is a wonderful dancer, our knees never bump, we always

look at each other, and he has beautiful body, lean, steel hard planes covered with

Baby soft skin.

And when we are naked in the bathroom he wraps his arms around my waist and he

tells me that my body is beautiful, and though I am fifty pounds overweight, I  have

always thought my body was beautiful. I guess I needed to hear it from him, because

now I don't think I'm so crazy for thinking it.

And then I am coming home from work and I have made a fortune taking some company

public and he is there in his crisp cotton button down saying that he's sorry he's

been so busy, that he wants to make it up to me, that he still wants me like the first time

he saw me (and the first time he saw me, boy did he want me).

And he sits me down to watch basketball with me, watch ballroom dancing

with me, and dance the merengue and the rumba like his mother was a gitane and his father, his father a pasadoble king.

And then our dance will deteriorate into something seedy

and arousing and then we will go out unto the balcony where it's thirty degrees and

slide our cold naked bodies to the floor and I will rise above him and our frozen breaths

will be the only light in the hot cold night.

And then we will be old with kids in college and we will still have sex. And I won't be alone

forever.

Sometimes I touch myself when I think of him, but I cannot make myself come. I always stop beforehand. Funny it feels like cheating. Funny I can never get it quite right..

That is what my confidence man does: he is my filling and unfulfilling lover.

My confidence man wants me but never comes to take me away. My confidence man

is everything I need and yet nothing, nothing at all. He is misbegotten image in a dimming,

defeated mind. My confidence man has no armor, has no sword, has no rhythm, has

no regret as he has no heart. My confidence man will never show and I will never know

how those things feel, that I feel in my mind and so I stay home where he comes to me

any time I close my eyes and beckon.