6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER

A LOT OF WORK

goes into making sex alluring sex

is just this and that

but it seemed, for a moment, that a new

climax had been won when

even the sky fingered me

with a slobbery insistence when

we were retching with so much desire

we created a whole new atmosphere

grabbing at sex things /

using the sick bag to be actually sick in

now the shower curtain is transparent

it’s a way of saying, “I want you too

to have this experience

so that we are more alike

like a sign that life struck once

in a slippy-bits marathon

that began when our eyes were magnets

yanked to each other’s fully-charged

crotches at a picnic

when it was essential

to make every enhancement

to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent

beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system

until even the trees had to dash inside

to pour ice in their underpants”

while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it,

united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or

satisfying itches to that

catchy bridge section in Chopin

(I couldn’t wait to come

with Chopin through his melancholic meadow

(not that I approve of background music

(I prefer to foreground the piano

by massaging it loud and all over

until the top layer comes off in my hand

and the pedal squeaks for humanity

(I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument

of interruption and consciousness

(though I also like to take light swims, to get away

from what I FEEL (today I felt

jelly beans resemble kidneys))))))

which throbs like everyone grieving