They treat my tiny cup of piss
like it was performance art.
One is now a country occupied,
another’s occupation, another’s victim,
the site of ultimate taboos.
One is now a code to be broken,
a sausage stuffed with sausage,
a shirt turned inside out.
One is now the definition of pornography,
a man without means, the voyeur’s
wettest dream, the voyeur’s nightmare.
The least of my worries.
A bug in the sluttish ear,
an easy penetration,
aural sex.
A lighted probe
down vacant streets,
along empty canals.
Where are the sounds of yesteryear?
Proof one’s responses are knee-jerk.
The story: brief, tasteless.
The style: flat, clinical.
The dialog: garbled.
The setting: cavernous, symbolic.
The dominant trope: onomatopoeia.
The protagonist: wooden.
The theme: anyone can be somebody’s fool.
The moral: avoid being French-kissed by a tree.
The point-of-view: second-hand omniscient.
The denouement: ambiguous.
No woman I have slept with
left me quite so light-headed.
A wiretap on the heart,
covert intelligence,
one blind man’s bluff,
a dangerous liaison.
Cough, and give yourself away.
Sometimes a cigar
is just a cigar.
and the encouragement of fear,
a stylish but optional part
of the fetishist’s ensemble.
(Don’t you wish your parts were optional?
Don’t you wish you weren’t?)
I should, perhaps, have brought flowers.
No one has ever been so explicit
in giving voice to her desires:
she tells me what to take off,
how to pose and for how long,
when to move.
Not satisfied
with what there is of me to see,
she wants my bones, my cloudy lungs.
Further evidence
that we are the monster,
not the scientist;
not beauty,
but the beast;
that induction has its limits,
that there is a demon
in the box
and a ghost in the machine.