Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Somewhere in the weedy lyrical luxuriance
of my Sargasso Sea exists my sexuality –
which swims as if it were a nymphet,
even though I am a man: amphibiously,
ambidextrously and indiscriminately under,

up, around, between the deeps and shallows
of the span of my eternally self-justifying
consciousness: she gathers evidence
against and for whatever fluid metaphor
my maleness tries to conjure up to rouse itself –

reporting to some lobster judge who weighs
each con and pro – a lobster judge who
sometimes quite ferociously commands a NO!
Lord knows the very notion of a lobster claw
effectively lays down the law to my most

pertinent appurtenance, and I retreat,
in every sense, back to the prison fence
beyond which I assure you I behave. But when
he nods a YES!, a coalescence of his favorite
burbling Caribbean currents comes to bless:

my nymphet leaps in ecstasy, delivering
the news to an increasingly tumescent me,
and all is, for the moment, swell. (Hell, the truth:
now the nymphet turns into a virile youth,
with whom I – well, don’t ask, don’t tell.)

.