I Confess

Sensually and suggestively beguiles –
hinting at gratuitous heraldic ormolu
and other swelling self-indulgent wiles:
buried in them, still, the Englishman’s
baroque: Charles the Second’s era’s style:

Palladian geometry so choked with
savage curves you’ve got to swoon
a little at each swerve (Westminster Abbey’s
funerary monuments' ornately muscled
thighs: sighs and hidden hard-ons).

It’s darkly English, yes – this sinful-
seeming secrecy of an aesthetic inquiry
requires me to relish to the point of fetish
lapidary symmetries, looping over
into concave, convex sharply angled

cranny, nook and hole: invoking through
the mineral and animal and vegetable,
something like a heedless human soul.
In privacy my idle hand will turn to piracy:
command a purple pencil and demand

to swing into and on the inward body’s
ropes to squeeze each gland to cultivate
a flooding, damned and grand
hormonal intricately pulsing pressing
mess. I crave voluptuous excess.



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