Easy Does It

Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Our bodies are made for bliss
and blessedness. Do you trust me
more than the ten-minute rush
 
followed by steady sips on a flask
of clear fire to keep the ashes
in your head at rest—ecstatic
 

confusion that threatens to toss
your entire flat for the one thing
no one else will be able to find

as your back slides down a wall
in a kitchen no good for eating
or drinking. No One Deserves

To Be Happy is what the bottle
would say if its label hadn't been
peeled off at the trestle table

where our fathers thundered over
us with Bibles marked in red,
our mothers in the shadows

fingering themselves with complete
abandon. Two kinds of bliss then:
above the waistline and below
 
as love's genie snakes in and out
of the body's nine sacred holes.
Cannot compel you. What's taken
 
in, kept out, approximates the soul's
shape. There won't be enough
time, only now and now and now
 

which is simply the Lord knocking
softly on a tattered screen door
slammed one too many times

at summer's end, its hinges
rusted through. And you marvel
at who'd design such things others
 
have bought into—salvation
a Black Friday pre-dawn sale
where everyone can walk out
 

with wrapped armfuls no one
will want next year, be sure
of that. Nothing so consequential

as putting your cock in another
man's mouth for the first time.
What comes after is what we are 
 
trying on for size. "What's wrong?"
the girlfriend asks, the bed unmade,
only to be answered by a silence
 

bordering on shame. Because bliss
on the sly is a mote in the eye,
a Gethsemane where everyone else

has fallen asleep, your cup spilling
over. Be drunk with me tonight
on our bodies endlessly rocking
 

in back of a wagon whose wobbly
wheels get sucked down in the road's
muddy ruts. Easy does it. Nowhere

else to get to—no place left to go.

 

Wednesday, January 15, 2014