Poem: Approaching Thirtyseven

Approaching Thirtyseven

After leaving my exboyfriend sleeping in his bed,
I think about turning thirtyseven in ten days,
and about being alone the next thirtyseven years.

There are some advantages. Give myself to poetry
wholeheartedly, undistracted by love’s demands.
Give myself to the unchanging arms of casual sex.

Back home, watching my favorite porn video,
the blond college freshman begging for the fist,
I take all of ten minutes. What to do with the other

fifty minutes to the hour, and the hours after that?
My books turn their backs on me. I clean
the common bathroom not cleaned for weeks,

but the grinning toilet bowl is a loser’s trophy.
I’m craving dully for the next hit, the bang of sex
or the wham of sounds transposing into an image.

In the interval between sex and poetry lies death.
The freshman intuits that. Which is why he begs
for the gloved fist to enter him again and again.

Poem: Swimming Lesson

Swimming Lesson

Like shiny well fed seals, two squealing boys
fought, over nothing, arm thrashing against
gold arm, spending their health extravagantly.
One dunked the other, held him down, arms tensed.

Their swimming coach, a man in his late fifties,
rose up beside them, water sluicing down
his sedimental torso. When he yelled
for them to stop and rapped one on the crown,

the rebel stuck out his tongue like a finger,
the other dived and slapped his own backside.
The coach threatened to tell their dads—they laughed—
and not continue teaching them, he lied.

They’d not have mocked him in those sunstreaked days
spent crawling long, interminable laps
under the watchful eye of champion trainers;
those breathless mornings when the colored caps

are stretched so taut they seemed ready to leap
off the block; the gunshots. He shook his head.
Squinting into the sun, he saw the glare
of light, the air, and something, somewhere, dead.

*