Her image lasts longer than the scar of a good time
or a cut, deep in the flesh of the face at the front line.
She takes what you give, she sucks off your guilt
‘til the flowers of expectation dry out and wilt.

I went to her room and we talked about my breakdown.
I was Hegel, I was Kant, but she saw a clown.
La commedia è finita, I started to cry.
She took me in her arms and I stopped asking why.

I fell in my corner and I tried to resist
my small time emotion, her slap on the wrist.
I was Rimbaud’s rude poetry to a desperate Verlaine
‘til the stroke of her rebuke cracked the whip again.

“Regret nothing you silly boy,” she said with a grin,
“You’re a Samuel Spode, not a sexual Solzhenitsyn.”
I strutted like a cock from her boudoir to the hall,
pecking up my clothes, half blinded like St. Paul.

There on the floor were the remains of my last meal
and a shredded book of poems she had tried to conceal.
The birds clucked and fussed as she saw me to the door.
Her final act of cruelty, a kiss, was the last straw.

Recorded by The Sighs of Monsters and available on Bandcamp.