A master leads his slave
through the bar,
the slighter man bound
to his lodestar
by a leash hooked
to his collar,
every surface of him swathed,
rubber, leather,
hard to tell in this light.
Slits in the hood,
almost nothing of him
visible. They look,
I think, ridiculous
—but something
compelling about it, too:
only an outside:
absurd, elaborate universe
of buckles and straps,
so nothing of the interior
can be known.
From a distance sex looks,
inevitably, awful:
what’s less graceful
than transport?
Face focused
to a single point,
clenched, contorted, or the mouth
stretched wide—
Therefore this exterior’s sealed,
blank, so that we might
guess at what lies
beneath: happy abdication,
the will locked down at last,
unable to choose
or to act. Who knows?
Impenetrable,
what’s paraded before us.