For a short sweet while,

I was the fantasy in someone’s

romantic fiction,

the heaving bosom

on the well licked

page, thumbed

back and forth,

back and forth,

till she was sated

and I was forgotten, used

up and left hanging

in the middle of page seventeen…

for a while I was the hero

with wild hair, the broken man tamed,

the savage beast ridden and held;

all is a dream on this score,

after all, it was someone else’s

fiction.

Ian D. Hall 2016