Twenty-One

Sex with him was like performing
a science experiment on a fresh-made
god – testing the reactions of a body
newly sprung in youth to
the requirements and truth –

blunt implications – of a breathless
blooming physical maturity:
the soft and tender insecurity
of boyhood mixed with
the importunate insistence

of the nascent reigning phallus
(Alexander storms the palace
of the crotch!). One watches – tests –
one’s own reactions, too: partaking just
as much as one can stand not only

of the glory of his infant manhood but
the recollection of the story
of one’s own: as if the long
dismemberment of history had
for this moment coalesced again

and found one in the pink one knew
when one was one-plus-two-times-ten,
instead of nearly three-times-twenty.
Hard not to feel whomped
stupid by such plenty.


.