STINKY

The tea tree oil smell, loamy and fetid, invaded my nostrils,
A sharp bite lingering, even after I put on my right shoe.
Leather --- you’d think it would be heavy enough
To mask a tiny blob of oil, a squirt to fight the fungi whose colony would, if left unchecked, eventually eliminate my toenail.

The shoes always go on last,
Sometimes, a sock-and-a-shoe, left; a sock-and-a-shoe, right.
Sometimes, sock-sock-shoe-shoe.
But always first, the shirt, then the pants, the belt, hopefully,
And only then, the socks & shoes.
Order is important to me.

I wanted to be smellier in the locker rooms of my youth,
Proof that I was part of the tribe
that clashed in the epic games of passage
that I knew would signify my manhood.
Without the stink, without the games,
What was I but a kid in a shower, no reason to soap up?
Nothing to bring under the smothering protection
of the females beyond the battlefield, which admitted
Only boys, only men, only warriors.

Without sports, I did not get unruly, savage, angry, ferocious, intentional or manly. Without any of the stink,
I never learned to clean up.
Nor could I veer back along the trajectory
of life’s ever-present pendulum, a swing back to order,
To tidiness, to non-savagery, to domestication:
A need to yearn for the quiet sanctuary of home, of security, finding an excuse to continue being a warrior.

Instead, a descent into the stinkier precincts of outlaw bad boy life. Unapproved, hidden from those doing the approving.
A therapeutic wallow in life’s mud,
Regression into the savage, primitive.
Man getting filthy, being filthy.

I enter the house late, sweat flowing, bonded with clods of earth, dustings of bat guano and other secret smelly primal odors,
My own at the pits and the crotch and the breath.
I emerge from a randy romp with a total stranger,
Sports fuck and performance sex,
Conducting an olfactory symphony of erotic stink
That is only possible through complete surrender to pleasure.

All the while, a coiling spring, inside a passive man boy,
Tightening ever so slowly, year by year,
Until a microscopic line is crossed, a coil wound too tight,
A snap, a very evident snap, a public snap that unleashes
the pendulum’s governor,
Setting off the wild careening, back and forth,
A great wind that sweeps away all smells and evidence of manhood, both cloistered and unwashed.

And leaves a smooth, clean natural surface
Upon which to build a new life that,
In it’s own way, brings the warrior into the house, never to hide again,
A love warrior who lives inside every moment,
who never has to be ashamed again.