5. MALE
Your body knows no beauty that falls softly
Loosened as the moonlight on my skin,
Lilacs don’t bloom with your fragrance,
Petals don’t open at your whim.
Your beauty knows nothing of azure light,
Of droplets of dew or blossoms of cherries,
Suspended in your dense, perfumed breath,
I think of steel, not of lavender prairies.
You come with a violent beauty, like war
One that tears through body and blood,
I crave no touch but your rough, iron hands
As I lay sodden in your carnal flood.
Your beauty storms, beats, defiles,
Sharp tempests of air in my burning lungs
I know my margins only from your fire
My riverbeds and valleys only from your tongue.
Your skin doesn’t soothe, it flays me alive
I break under your fingers as morsels of bread
Clasped around your salty infinity
Your hardness shatters me like spume over crags.
I bear the brunt of your opulent being,
Like this I love you, neither wrong nor right
But a man, with clenched body and mind
The love I love loves me fierce and blind.
© 2013 Ani Keating