Wriggle and Hiss

Every poem, dream, reflection, thought:
all cast-off – clung-to – cognitive ephemera –
simple, fraught, ham-handed or complex –
comes down, or up, to sex. Let’s give Herr
Doktor Freud a nod in this: that human fear
or bliss or indecision or determination
to prevail or cede in spent defeat
commutes to the mammalian urge to treat
the enterprise as willing or unyielding flesh:
we are the scions of a grand disinterested

biology – enmeshed in brain and loin
and groin and limb: we are a complicated
hymn to the imprisoning incarnate: driven
by the need to procreate not merely human
babies but the products of a labor aimed
at furiously generating synchronies
and lullabies and tirades of creation: het-up
agonies and sweetened harmonies insist
on genesis: and we’re the hiss and wriggle
and ejaculators of the lot: flaunting what

we’ve got or hiding our imagined insufficiencies
behind opacities of shame. I woke just
now from meadows of a sensuality so gamy,
dense, far-reaching and interiorly breaching
that I hadn’t any choice but to succumb to it.
Despite its vise-like despotism over every
breath I take, on balance I am grateful
I’m not numb to it. Let libido rise up like
a banshee; rule me in its faultless sway.
There’s somebody I want to kiss today.


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