Just Because You Wear Skinny Jeans…Doesn’t Mean You Are Skinny Jeans…Waist-Training Grid Reference Lost or Deleted or Otherwise Missing, Sections 2 & 3 – Mark Parsons

November 1, 2025

2. The Starlet

Wind through the capitol
Alternates pressing the weatherproof scrim
To the intricate schema of
Galvanized metal like paper conformed for a rubbing,
Unequaled technique
For the capture of miniscule rises, depressions,
A random frottage, before billowing out and away from the lattice,
Arrhythmic and tense respiration, labored and heavy
Each breath like the symptoms of courtship disorder, obscene
Phone call to starlet-to-be, who’s sixteen and supports her whole family,
Therefore is taking her parents to court,
Asking the judge to emancipate: life with a mother and father
Prohibits robust and unqualified—lewd,
If not wanton—
Expression of young sexuality,
Which expression she feels like she owes to her fans,
Tweeners who watched her
On Disney,
Grew up with her,
Who now
Yearn for a role model,
Someone to act out and advocate
(Hip-hop influenced
Slinky beats
With the auto tune
Full blast)
(A vintage Roland
TR-808 drum machine lending
Tracks street cred)
Create a soundtrack for inappropriate sex
That will piss off their parents
(Read: with racial and ethnic minorities)
To facilitate shed of her
White bread, wholesome rep,
Middle-aged third wave feminists
Sad
When they see this good girl
Become
The hot mess who’s
Staking a claim to adulthood
In videos
Pro-degradation,
BDSM for the trailer park
Set,
The problem not bed but brain
For this beautiful talented teen in seclusion, this ingenue
Slave to her own insecurity.
Telling herself indecision’s decision
She desperately tries to conceal the self-doubt
Eating away from inside:
Secret splinter
That grows to fissure her
Spent
Emotional armor,
Jonesing for one more fix
Of the used to be
Ever present applause, and what now is censure,
Her abject need
Symptom of bleak and depressing, disheartening sexual practice,
Submissive awakening wrapped in empowerment
Guided by feminine energy bullshit with deep psychosexual elements
Never considered, and leaving her hung out to dry,
On the verge of enlightenment;
Writing in journals she details her body’s reactions,
The ones she can’t stop
Overthinking
As part of a vapid, reverse psychology,
Formula-bound assembly
For major properties, assets, and goods
(I.e., her) a last ditch
Endeavor to prove by prostrated and public debasement
She’s stronger than all the emotions that plague her, despair and uncertainty, fear and anxiety,
Like her overweight fans, who attempt to convince themselves
They have body confidence, bend the world with some selfies posted on social media,
Cloak their shame
With a gross display of their hollow pride,
An attempt to erase from their minds the deceit they can’t stop seeing in others
(The Other’s not “Big,” but as lean as a blade
That’s so sharp
Even etheric projections can’t skate
Protoplasmically,
Slither the length of his long-tapered flat grind, the knife edge
Where torsos converge and balloon into one at the junction of body self-consciousness:
One-armed bro hugs with back pounds, handshakes like vise grips
Lost in the ponderous corpulent stomachs
Put forward by men who’ve been subject to endocrine system disruptors
In food and environment, blanket exposure
To chemical compounds that feminize males from the moment
Their mothers conceived in their wombs,
Bringing about consequential delays in the onset of puberty,
And a permanent absence of masculine, androgen-influenced features,
Which lack of the masculine attribute subtly transmutes
To a feminine presence, producing these bodies—by way of prolonged adolescence—
That look like the three little pigs in the mortified showers
Of middle-school locker rooms)
Every encounter imbued with transference
Of critical judgment of self,
An appraisal
Already and always
Waiting
Wherever whenever
The subject—
Become object, arrives
With his protests of conscience in tow
Like a birthmark or flaw
Lodged in the iris of every thin person
Around him, a splinter of doubt in the plus-sized heart
Of the big is beautiful true believer
Disciple arguing fat acceptance as human rights.

3. Judgment

Is it a question of sympathy,
Sharing the malady license to judge skin
That evokes
Gluttony, sin, and obliterates
All individual features and traces of skull
From a face like the mask you can make using papier mâché
And a party balloon, with some cigarette burns
For the eye-holes and mouth, like the ones that were worn by the students
Who fall in the meat-grinder hopper
In Pink Floyd: The Wall?
Dressed in the pelt of their binges
Like fur from an animal
Hunted and killed in prehistory,
During an ice age—draped over shoulders,
The lats dripping fat, hides of obesity
Gorged on the wearers’ self-centeredness,
Shame and distress, the discomfort of chafing from flesh
Rubbing flesh and the pain in their joints
As the body’s rebellion becomes psychological; growing infirmity
Yields to a defect in character:
From the physical,
To emotional,
To the spiritual,
Shame and self-hatred return
So much stronger and drive an obsession
With mouth-feel and taste
Of food engineered by chemists in labs,
Manufactured to hook.
Chronic unrest on the cellular level
Produces increasingly
Swollen amplitude feedback loops
Oscillating wildly to issue tells, like the rolling,
Undulant swells
Mottled with wart-like
But velvety, soft,
Yielding
Dark scaly patches
Blossomed to garland the creases
Of joints,
Acanthosis nigricans
Grown like mold in the lightless folds
Of perspiring dank flesh,
To be draped like heraldic collars of brown or rust-colored skin
Some hermetic order bestowed on victims
Of empty, over-abundant calories, artifacts found on the morbidly stout
(The description the name) lying and eating
Themselves to untimely but Social Security-qualified physical disability,
Ushered to graves that will soon be warm
With the sympathy
Offered by
Both the fit and the fat
Alike,
Premature death
From a host of diseases and terminal illnesses.
Obese teenagers
Dressed in racing stripe yoga pants
Cleft with front-butts,
And gunt-bulging stone-washed jeans
Stuffed in gumboots, ride
“Rascal”
Mobility scooters
Paid for with medical welfare
Entitlement checks
Through the tombstone aisles of prepackaged, eye-level food,
While coming to worship their idol,
Whose view of the world mirrors their own, and who’s
Trying to drive from her mind with a yoga pose, the unbidden image of
Mother’s body—the backs of thighs like a chicken’s wattles,
Excrescent flesh in a stretchy cotton-knit warm-up track suit—but only to see
Her own minimal, barely perceptible cellulite dimpling constricted
In diamond- and rhombus-shaped cut-out panes of compression knit workout pants.