Truth be told (either by me or someone else who inevitably speaks up).

Jensen, Charles

Truth be told (either by me or someone else who inevitably speaks up),
was a crazy teen fresh from the farms with a cockwalk two feet off the
ground and boots to match. No pasture knew me like the Lutherans back
home:

(lies). I've made an effort here to list all the real life lips I kissed
that first year out of the egg, so many bits of shell in my beak, but no
avail. Every face I nested on had two of them, spread open like a
flytrap

and my fly was trapped between those gritty teeth. The first man I
kissed got off scot-free. The rest were not as lucky: as months wore on
my head got weaker, my lips more needy and frail, always on life
support,

claiming this was the end, the last goodbye. I remember standing in the
dorm kitchen one night, telling a man my insides did nosedives whenever
he walked by and the awkward kissing that ensued:

the grizzle of his face all over me like a cheese grater, I couldn't get
enough. Like the fertile fields of my youth, I begged to be plowed, torn
right up the chest, opened and tilled, spilled out on the sheets. I
clung to him

like fruit on its vine, never ready to drop until at long last even my
skin was rotten through, my smell disastrous and I had nothing left to
taste. Those wrinkled lips of an old nectarine, like a smoker, dried up

rustle of an autumn leaf pretending the wind blows it onto a pile of
identical leaves. No one buys it. Truth be told, I was a winsome boy,
too coy, prudish even, some sad Mary Jane with clunky shoes dressing up
a wall

with the pattern of my shirt, barely smart enough to catch a wink and
never ready to pitch back shimmy-hipped flirt. My lips got kissed,
though, again and again. Just by luck. The bulls of them smiled at me,
reared, and dug in.