Admit you’d freak if forced to cross a chasm
on wires that wobble and sag in saw-toothed winds
as, each ten thigh-quivering feet, you squat
and grab a yellow flag. Could anything induce you
to chew duck embryos and cockroaches,
then wash them down with liquified pig spleen?
You’d have to be dead to let bees, scorpions,
or tarantulas swarm over you. True,
the blonde Surfer Girl—diamond stud lighting
the flat beach of her belly as she’s locked
in a glass coffin and sunk in an icy lake—fears
her bikini will release a corkscrew hair.
Bartender-Bodybuilder, grinning through a mask
of bees, fears he’s a bit underdeveloped
you-know-where. Haw-hawing Cowboy,
who giddyups off with the 50,000-buck prize,
would scoop out and swallow his own eyes
before he’d read an ad, much less a page of Keats.
M. Artiste, though, battles the shakes each time
he parks downtown at night, speaks to a pretty
grocery clerk, or books his own flight on the Internet.
While some men develop strength, endurance,
mastery of pain, he exercises sensitivity. Result?
He sees disasters whiz like meteors at his body’s
frail capsule. Result? Life strikes him as quick breaths
seized between tsunamis—rare apple martinis
amid snifters of pig spleen piled high and deep.
Result? His longest escape from fear comes
in the moments between the shark tank of sex
and the blood-drenched, haunted house of sleep.