Some Zero Game

Sat on a bench on the edge of a lawn,
nursing lemonade with gin, 
toying with memory’s engine.
Why is yes minus es. Memory of
an echo echoes in the memory. 
Swallows desolate the colonnade.
A distant couple’s berating passes out of hearing.
Little boys in the shadows 
spit machineguns.
A bat slices the air, 
reverberating in the ear. 
Stars not yet there 
in the purple poise. The gears, 
the worms, the shifts, the buttons 
down the suit disappear. This early fall 
early evening suits itself, leaves 
blowing across the lawn 
like leaves 
blowing across the lawn,
the soul the sole remains.

Learning New Things 

I stay up late,
covers pulled to double chin.
My cat is curled like a waxing moon
against operated spine.
I’m scrolling through tips
for deep throating from my fellow gays. 

I brush the back of my tongue
every night for a week,
gagging Tom’s toothpaste
all over the sink.

I ignore advice to practice with a banana—
the tip too rough and dirty for my liking.
Just call me confidence
as I grab your dick with both hands,
swallow that joystick in three big gulps,
vomiting all over your freshly
laundered sheets.

Such A Gorgeous Dying

Cigarette smoke hazing over your face, Clove. 
Sex smell because of you—sheets wet all over.
I remember our first time together:

“I never knew about that,” I said.
You pushed my face between your legs. 
Sweet, the taste of you, no longer a cliche.
You held me in your hand, slow and loose. 
Then fast until I came all over your stomach. 
You looked down, slid your finger through it, 
brought it to your lips. Then kissed me.   

“I’m just going a little longer,” you said,
rolling over, fingers tracing circles
between your legs.

I laid next to you and watched.
Then, startling me, you sat up 
and straddle my face. 
“Let me see those bastard eyes,” you moaned. 
And came, covering my face, wet. 

“Give me your tongue.”
And you pressed yourself against it.
“You’re such a good boy,” you said
as you grabbed my hair and brought
me harder against you.
“Taste all of me. I want you to have it all.”  

You pushed my head away by my hair:
a hot, hard stream hit my face,
and I couldn’t help but open my mouth,
just a bit, and swallow.   

cum stains and cat litter

with one final squeeze 
she pushes me and 
all my cum out of her
and lays on top of me;
everything drips down my leg. 

the sun burns through
the turning autumn leaves
my dirty window
my cat litter bedsheets
my heart. 

everything upon this bed dries up:
time, love, cum; only cat litter remains. 

i leave her to pick my kids up from school.

after dinner they’ll slip into dreamland.

and soon i’ll stand before my bed, 
contemplate changing the sheets, 
forget it, lay down, and go to sleep. 

At the Hospital

It is infuriating
how the fear of death
makes you so pathetic.

How you suddenly like life,
enjoy sadness,
regret the wasted days.

The peculiar thing is,
as they say,
that when you lose something
you understand
how important it was,

but when having a near death experience
you haven’t lost anything,
not yet

but the mere possibility
of losing
this life you have

this unimportant little life
with these few romances
the bromide blood ties
the ideas and contemplation
the fun and the years
and the mistakes
and the small acts of kindness
and the small efforts of creativity

it all coruscates
into a total
that in your mind
is so beautiful
that besides feeling
incredibly ungrateful

you also feel irritated
by the cowardice
you are washed in

precisely because of the beauty
precisely because you are not ready
to leave
not until you grow old
and the quality in your life
lessens enough
for you to become proud enough

to be ready enough to go.

And you are hungry suddenly
to live, to try
to climb towards the goals
and you don’t care as much
about the relationships
that went bad,
about your dissatisfying paychecks
or your appearance
and you almost pray
for another shot

and all the stupid sadness you had
appears so wasteful
like a meal run cold
over an argument.

Care less or care more?

Sunday Service 

I want you to chain me
to the bed like a cross
fallen sideways.

Wind blew hard, lips pursed,
knocked Christ right over.

That tongue better start
singing hymns to my skin.
Wrap your beads around
my wrists until blood
draws in sacrifice. 

Reach hands up
high in worship.
This holy water
we blessed fogs
every window. 

Service only lasts
an hour before
we break bread.

When Death Calls

Love opens the door inside the dream 
we call today. In eases Death. 
I sit the freak on the sofa. 
Slip into the kitchen to fix drinks. 
Hear Love invite our guest to leave. 
Death mumbles something I can’t make out 
above the seltzer fizz and the cubes clinking. 
When to the living room I return, 
hand each a cold sweaty glass, 
Love stands at the window, 
watching a cloud eat the sun. 
Death, on a cushion slouching, accepts the mix 
of bitters, lime, soda, spirits. Grins into my face 
he hopes Love and I are well enough making out? 
Opening the door to tongues tangling 
anxious poetry; fingertips brushing breasts; 
never closer to meet. And it’s me at the window, 
watching both guests dissolve in a squall of hail, 
ticking at the glass its tiny watches, 
making the world out to be cold and intimate – 
alone and alive as a thought 
seeking in a picture to hide. 

Fight Songs

I once had a great girlfriend 
who liked to play an album
of college fight songs while 
we made love in her bedroom.

So, even now, decades later,
whenever I hear On Wisconsin,
or especially Cheer, Cheer
For Old Notre Dame, I still
involuntarily start to swell up,
but not exactly with anything
as stupid as fucking school spirit.

Three Cumshots

***

I. When I Got Religion

She holds my full cockhead
joyful, in her eucharistic mouth,
And I am busy, enraptured
thinking about God.
Oh. My. God.

I struggle to bring my myself
back to the immense reality
of my sacramental arousal,
the beautiful young woman
on her knees, as if in prayer
sucking sucking sucking.

Spiritual Oneness does exist.
I saw It in her pubic folds
revealed, not at all concealed,
as I licked her to orgasm,
there remained a veil of Mystery.

Those same folds, now puffy
with pleasure she touches lightly,
lightly, lightly as I come
as I come, come, come
into her holy God-given mouth,
I hear the All-Compassionate One
laughing and laughing!

***

II. Literature

With semen on her face,
Kim smiles up at me,
wearing thick reading glasses
as if the literature of our erotic
love needs a sharp focal distance.

In fact, there exists no clever sequence
of humorous or romantic combinations,
neither words, phrases, nor paragraphs
with adequate warmth and sincerity
to describe our reality with precision,
not this love, not anyone’s love.

We know this, and try anyway.
On good days literature gets close
enough to make words wet
like ink on thick-textured paper.
Electronic, digital words seem pale,
tell only half the story, ghost-writing,
and we hear none of the music.

***

III. Jacking It for Jesus

I might also say:
Boinking for the Buddha, Muff-Diving for Muhammad,
Taking It In the Ass for Allah, Yanking Kosher for Yahweh.
In India, I don’t know which deities to worship,
so I spurt sacred cream at sunrise, for all of them.

After several million years of human fucking,
we might offer our gods praise most-passionate,
in those moments, those few seconds when
lovers cry, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh My God!”
And the lovers really mean it.
Unintentionally giving praise where it is due,
due to the sincere nature of most orgasms,
fucking can often be as worthwhile as prayer.