Stinky

Tea tree oil, loamy and fetid, invades my nostrils,
Sharp bite lingering even after I put on my right shoe.
You’d think the leather would mask the smell of a tiny blob of oil,
A squirt to fight the fungi whose colony would, if left unchecked, eat me alive.

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 signify manhood.
Without the stink, without the games, what was I but a kid in a shower, no reason to soap up?
Nothing to bring to the smothering protection of the females beyond the battlefield,
who admitted only warriors.

I did not get angry, unruly, ferocious, manly.
Without any of the stink, I never learned to clean up.
Nor did I veer back along the trajectory of life’s ever-present pendulum,
a swing back to order, tidiness, to domestication:
That yearning for a quiet sanctuary of home, just 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.
Therapeutic wallow in life’s mud, man getting filthy, being filthy.

I enter the house late, sweat flowing, bonded with clods of earth,
Dustings of leather and bat guano: Secret smelly primal odor at my pits and crotch, my fiery breath.
The randy romp with a total stranger, sports fuck, performance sex,
An olfactory symphony of erotic stink that is possible only in complete surrender to pleasure.

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

Leaving a smooth, clean natural surface upon which to build a new life that,
in it’s own way, admits the warrior into the house, never to hide again,
The love warrior who lives inside every moment,
Who never has to be ashamed again.


(Note: This is a reworking of an earlier poem.)