What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. ~ William Blake

[1] The very last time (even though We didn’t know this as yet) We were attending to our mutual And always separate hungers (think Of the many separate tongues with Which a daylily laps summer air.)

You demanded that I break The silence of effort, of ex- Halation and inhalation with Words. So I gave you Neruda (Leaning into the afternoons, I Cast my nets into the sea trashed by Your oceanic eyes) I had previously Memorized reading him to you.

I could see, even then, those words Meant more for bodies that coil In the mind, fall heavily to our bodies Stoned with sex, like airplanes with Ripped fuselages. They are still Falling towards mine like starlight.

[2] Next weekend you met, honestly, you Said, with no intention to deceive me, A man who stuck to what he knew Best. None of my abstractions, God Forbid, in bed, none of the mad Fumbling to unbutton the soul from Its sackcloth of fluid and flesh.

He laid it out all straight you said. You breast in his mouth was just That, a round supple mass of flesh With a great capacity for pleasure, As was your sex engorged over his. It was the flow and you went with it, You said. Did I understand any of this?

Yes, I do now. Cross Freud with Rumi: “Sir, sometimes a penis is just a penis, And not a fragment of the light-body!”

Is an ever-widening grid Of mutable lines,

Over which dreams Hopscotch.

[1]
Last night you were
stunned
dumb
by the face of a woman
sitting next to you
in a humid room.

And             your hot breath
of desire was a summer wind,
sirocco, knocking the door
of your mind off its hinges.
What to do in face of this?
[2]
Don the scabbard.
Heft the sword.
Put on chain mail
of words.
Ride into a lighted space.
Kneel down in front of
whatever is burning there:
an altar of fire. A ruby dark
sacrificial stone. A muse.
Undress. Bucknaked,
Spill your guts out.




My Poems