Cause and Affect

You don’t want the glass of orange juice you just poured
once you receive the shock of the first sip
after brushing your teeth.

When you come to the end of a run
heaving, hands on knees, it is not as funny
as they think it is, when they tackle you to the ground.

Your breathing is startled out of all sense of itself.
Your lungs, think my god what now -
and your teeth

are still reeling
from what you did to them.
You are in shock, out of breath and cringing.

So am I.

I checked Facebook. I had one ‘add me’ request.
I clicked on the man’s name -
my friend’s boss

He had just one
photo album, named “Anna”
with a photo of me and him taken at a party

last year, when he was 65. (I am 25.)
On his wall, was my name
in two questions:

“How is it going with Anna?”
I have met him twice.
“Is she still single?”

This is not the first time
this has happened. Once a 74-year-old
had a drug dealer do a full-size painting of me

on his Living Room wall, naked. I was 14 that time.
When I walked in everyone else
laughed hysterically.

It isn’t this though.
It is the thought of them both pulling at themselves
their wrinkled bodies rising to meet my face like a fungus

from damp creases, imagining some other me,
who likes this, who says things
and when

it comes
it is my name called out to the walls
it is me that the neighbours wonder about.