Swinging Soliloquy

[tectak]

Well.....by the end I figured out the narrator was a cross-dresser...so then I assumed the rope thing referred to erotic asphyxia, hence the swollen lips. Botox never occurred to me.
Unfortunately I was never moved, only slightly puzzled. I don't understand enough about the relationship, or why being naked shouldn't be important, or why the protagonist being "a man again" was something for his ex-lover to be thankful ("amen") for.
I'm also not sure what "my one great lie" was....I read it as the cross-dressing, which seems a little too prevalent these days to be considered a "great" lie. I do like the implication that this shared lie somehow gave meaning to both lives, and that IS a lovely line.
I missed the tense change at "I hang my locks..." and had to go back to get the shift to the present. Maybe a stanza break here?
Best line, image-wise:
"In shades of jaundiced light I see my body in relief;
latex lit by street lamps, lying dead across my chair."
But then I had to wonder if the narrator saw himself as a blow-up doll, which led to another whole layer of interesting confusion.
Needs some tweaking. I had to read it three or four times before I thought I had the sense of it.
Best, Leah

Leah, you are a bugger . You press me for clarification in all the right places. Yes. A cross-dresser and gay. Botoxed, bewigged in a busty latex over-body. The simplistic point being that the CD thinks that all of the subterfuge, the lie, is necessary for his relationship to work...it is incomprehensible that his gay partener still can have sexual desires for him without all the gender-changing trappings. It gets pretty complicated if you really go there. As soon as the CD takes off everything he becomes a man and cannot reconcile himself to believe that his lover likes him better that way. Phew. The relationship is bound to fail on many levels...but amen means "so be it".
Not your world nor mine but based  on a very sad event which two of my gay friends went through. Nice guys. Shame. Heteros have similar problems...it is allegorical.
Best,
tectak

For me this was all made clear in the poem. The last is one of the things that keeps this from being just a curiosity, the point in any relationship when you realize that so many questions lead only to the one answer: that at heart these two can never be compatible. This reaches further than just a love or sexual relationship, but can be applied to any two people struggling to make a go of it.

It all rings clear for me.

Precisely...but I would say that, wouldn't I? Oh, I already did
Best,
tectak

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I like the screaming bit, but found the nightmare somewhat distracting. However, that seems to hold up quite a bit of the actual events of the poem. Perhaps my greatest triumph here is spotting what appears to be a typo on lips.

Thanks as always brownlie but what is the typo? I need to know. Botox, cross-dresser with gender challenge in gay (ended) relationship. Bugger, now you know!
Best,
tectak

Iips instead of lips.