I am the most single bachelor.
The women who will escape my embrace
are incalculable.

If I was Augustus, I couldn’t count them
with an imperial census.
But I try, nonetheless, in a bar.

No man is truly tortured or crippled
if he’s part of a larger symmetry, if there’s someone
like him on the other side of the central divide.

There’s the halo/turd above the woman.
There’s the halo with teeth,
like an unsprung trap for dreamy animals.

Such a symmetry
would explain all this
mean-spirited strangeness.

And I fear that no such mirror
shines on me
and I am only running farther into the darkness.

I see the symmetry
to my mad zigzag
in a woman’s eyes.

Maybe I’m just horny,
maybe I’m just wrong.
Hunger makes everything unclear.

– Colin Dodds