sense memory

I can smell a sharkskin suit and a pair of gators from a block away.

Your outsides, your exoskeleton, a laid-back stingy brim porkpie, loose linen guayabera & pleated linen pants, but I know you. You look in the mirror, checking your style before you leave the house, before you hit the streets for the day, you stop and check yourself from the floor up and you see lemon yellow gators, five button green sharkskin three piece suit & matching lemon fedora with a green hatband, tilted to the side.  You haven’t used activator since 1979, but the jheri curls you wish you could still get away with are thinkin’ ’bout leavin’ grease stains on my pillow.

You got height, big Daddy, you look down on me.
You got smile, you count on it as a distraction.
You got answers, and they come out all pretty like poetry.
You count my gender as a handicap, my age as my weakness

(I am young and so, green & silly & easily turned by flattery
I am a grown, ripe & ready, a woman and so, easily turned by flattery
I am old, alone, abandoned, desperate and easily turned by flattery
you say, you say there is no inbetween,
you say, you say ‘no such thang as too young, never too old to be tried’)

but, 1979
been gone;
Lonely don’t call the shots.
I can tell a puppy from a wolf.
My woman is my strong, my age is my wise
Your poetic words are just so much gibberish and baby talk and as we’ve already established I’m a good time past baby, oh baby.
My pillowcases are 300 thread-count Egyptian cotton, lace edged pure white, soft, soft, soft & cool and clean against my cheek, just my cheek, at night.

You don’t know me big Daddy, but I know you & I can smell a sharkskin suit and a pair o’ gators a mile away.