Easy Does It
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.
