Act of Kind

Mister slept with Miss;
everything fits;
dawn’s first light shines
on bodies faded and inert
weary and worn
after the exertions
such as we know them
of paradisial pleasures;
to bring it down
to earth and simplicity
two bodies, one hairy and one smooth,
side by side, catching the light
after a long night of entanglement,
not yet awake to the burden
of servitude to love and Eros,
to a pledge lasting beyond the morrow.

In a heap on the floor
the embroidered nightgown;
freed from jockey shorts
the rod of Adam pendant
listless after a night’s work.

Let’s try it again
with a different cast;
Miss slept with Miss
gleaming hips
mutual spelunking in Eve’s cave
tongued and fingered,
later scissoring away,
twisting about in the kip
to put it unkindly, phallocratically,
like a couple of half-dead mackerel;
finally, fondly at peace
melting into each other
in the honey of oblivion.

The non-climactic finial to this piece;
Mister slept with Mister
traded-off trails of sperm
oozing on the bedclothes,
sweaty handling of each other
up and down the ordered
mirror of twin anatomies;
saliva presenting
at the blind Cyclopean eye
buried in the cleft and stretched
by the one-eyed monster
to an enormous tight-skinned wink.

There’s the lot of them. Let’s say
how the bedstead trembles
and then stops when
all of sudden they’re done.

And the doing,
how they all do it,
squeezing the mattress to death
one way or another
with not a care in the world,
grinding each other’s lust
to a fine alchemical powder
of shared desire, only seeming
and all for nothing
a moment’s chance
for escape, surcease
from the sealed tower of self
lonely and without reprieve;
confined, confirmed
to the sundering self
even in the act of kind,
in that deepest moment
of being and intention

a self shared with no one.