VIAGRA DE-CELEBRATION BLUES

Love Not Sex

Not love, but sex,
Then again, not sex, but a spasm,
And yet again not that,
But some leak, a seep, a mire, a fall, a chasm—
No success with which to fail,
Just punk perverse desire unfulfilled.

No heart will be informed, no hurt performed,
When what is barely known is spilled
And privately killed, brought forth from death to life,
Infirm made firm again
By an untold act of man self-rung.

Perhaps it'll raise the roof again
Or steel one's nerves or put some iron into that tack—
Oh, but always confusing love with sex
Or that youthful quirk with this ageing spasm
Or faith’s tender hope with a hose of flesh
Or love's lengthy height of life with this continued lowly loss…

Will we turn back or never see
That we can never gain it back?
And what does this bogus Ground now tell
Of what is lost or found?

I remember you all—or some—
But not your names—well, some.
At times, your faces drift into my dreams
And I find myself limbless, mouthless, tongueless,

A skinless fulsome mechanism of flesh,
A froth with a frog’s voice or no voice,
A consciousness lacking the usual—orifices, appendages,
Or any motion or device that even in a dream
Could any point or congress make.

Blind and alive, with piercing blue eyes and more,
Leaning far out over the narrowing ever-glistening universe
In quest of you—I mean what I think is You—
Or at any rate something like you—
Even that would do—or would it Never do?

But then, it's not Me, is it, but something like me.
Once I was That which I remember; now I am This
Which I cannot contemplate. Man and beast; breath and death.
I never used to hurt, I used to have my youth and eat it, too,
I laughed—but now, as old but worse than you,

I count the days and see the flaws,
I sense the swollen flesh, but feel the claws,
That shred instead of purge
The flesh's awful urge!

Such feats of imaginative mental want and waste is this!
Oh yes, dear guest, it's fun to taste the tale,
But those who live that writhing dirge may sometimes die
To say it's worse than that seedless spasm when you fail—
Even if you do not. Fail.

From the far side of faulted fur and hide,
Stretched out tight across the vault of universe like a drum,
As taut as a pregnant woman’s marbled belly,
Cold as clinging shrink-wrap that prevents any touch,

Hard as abrasive rock on which that hairless-headed vulture
Scrapes Prometheus on his fleshy side,
Chewing that out-of-season primordial god in every season,
Not from hunger or desire, but force of habit alone, enthralled—


Beyond this point,
Choiceless amphibians call with halted voice
Till there is no flesh and there is no kin and there is no call—

Only those tenuous see-through veins of death,
Cold blue against the warm pink surface of the skin,
And all these tadpole echoes of time that float away,
Yet sink, adrift like drunken mayflies in a thrumming vaulted hall.


rcs.
10th draft: 02/16/06
©1998 Ronald C. Southern

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