#29

So quick to hubris, poetry. A drunkard or delinquent with salacious leanings. The poet who receives from telephones and magazines the rhythm of his verse. All sorts of windows clouded by thumbprints. And a chorus of mannequins, Grecian style. The City of Athens in excavation. Torsos bulge with meaning.

The best poets sing of sex in metropolitan terms. Devotion in kneeling near candles, no God. Their words come forth in jets. On subways. At lunchtime. Ephemera filling the swell of pockets. They know what the Buddhists mean by no-mind. They have a job, or two, and they do them eyes buzzing.

I wanted to join them in afternoon romp. A child-as-man in uneven quatrains. Wrote, "the box they keep me in is a rattletrap affair." And squeezed myself luridly in imitation. They were my uncles, and fathers, and secret momentary lovers. They had dicks half-hard and wet with the saliva of Gods.

But my dick, in the vice of others' fingers, abridges its praises. Their beds no beds of poetry. How dear for them to love beauty in its physical guises. As I am slid and bent into postures never totalling in prayer. As if the path from my scrotum to my ass were gifted by the crown, and all the men who worship there in words that could never be my own