resensitization
by Jesse Hilson
(2)
I’d been alive a week when they sheared off
My penis, or a part. The doc had drunk
A martini, or two, and off skin came,
A spiraling peel of lemon.
And you wonder why men are psychos.
The project to resensitize is constant.
Once I do so, even a little, just
As Nature hates a vacuum, numbness rushes in
To cancel out all gains. A flood of videos—
The screaming dead across the globe—
Decays sensation until my conscience thins.
I get my feelings back, of necessity,
Once they’re gone, and only after, depending
On the lesson learned. The pain of it
Is coming back to new nerve endings once
The old are scoured off,
Only to regrow, in anguish.
A pleasure to be senseless: it must be,
Some agreed-on evil treat the culture gives,
Else why that one-way loss of heart that goes–
Yes, but then my eyes grow used to dark
Again, my eyes to mark related
Shadows cast by mobile point of flame,
The way a candle, taken to
A cluttered castle’s heights, will quake
Profusion through a pooling maze of shades—
So with endarkened life the stacks of books
That choke the narrow staircase
Chortle, chuff, and sway.
(3)
You didn’t know how bad you smelled, until
Too late, and I was there,
And you were with me, and we together
Were out among all the people with their jobs
And their money, the economic center of life.
Your hygiene threatened your paycheck.
Coming back to your senses implies
A trip somewhere, back to your intrinsic
Self where the truth is waiting,
Where you neglected it, before you went off
On some other futile journey.
You’re a hot embarrassment. You make me look
Bad because we’re an intellectual duo
In the same body. That’s how it looks
On the internet we have constructed out of paper.
This’ll be what you write about tonight forever.
This bridge between us, you scuttle across
To make me feel bad whenever you get the chance.
We’ll never be free from each other:
Rank-foul co-habitants of the monster cave.
I wrote a book about you. I showed it
To someone who said it wasn’t good enough,
Didn’t have enough yuppies in it. What youth,
What urbanity paves the trodden path
Of the disabled class? I described
The split, how you soft-machined the dyad
Of body/mind through your drugs,
The verbless, low inertia of your love.
Photo of Jesse Hilson
BIO: Jesse Hilson is a writer and artist living in the Catskills in New York State. His work has been published in Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Misery Tourism, Expat, Exacting Clam, Rejection Letters, Beyond the Last Estate, Excuse Me Mag, and other publications. He has written two novels, Blood Trip (2022) and The Tattletales (2023); one story collection, The Calendar Factory (2024); and a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo (2022). He can be found on Instagram at @platelet60 and has a Substack newsletter called Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin.