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The picture is a side profile,
your head tilted slightly down,
jawline deep soil-brown
and cheeks like dark sand.

You seem lost to a wayward thought, like
Joyce’s Gretta, a symbol of something,
that unknown something nestled deep in the corners of my mind,
its head shoved down stubbornly into its murky brown crevices.

My God, you’re something to look at.
Lips thick, stalwart, downturned,
set like the decision you’re about to make
trumps all others thus far—

But you’re only reading a fiction novel,
eyes scanning, two frantic lackeys scurrying across the words,
collecting, storing, feeding the pacing monster.
I watch through your ear as it growls, preparing to devour its meal.

It pokes its disproportionate head out at times,
peering, sizing me up, its snarl
whooshing violently out of flared nostrils.
I stare back, unfazed, flare my nostrils in rebuttal.

One of these days the two of us’ll be friends,
it will crawl sheepishly out of framed photos of you,
sidling up to me, I’ll stroke its two-dimensional scales,
feed it some more desperate words, send it on its merry way.