The Escaped.

Cocksure
cuckhold
hensure as in
D.H. Lawrence and his lovers
who probably played
word association games
into wee hours.
Love is to sex as
honey is to ink.
If I'm a caterpillar
my eyelids, your eyelids, are butterflies
gliding upstream on exotically woven sheets
imported, found
in the bazaar on Piccadilly
and bought from a dark-haired
heavily accented Persian mother,
distracted by a slight and slightly psychotic
man rattling his coffee in its ceramic
mug muttering scrambled words
to himself.

But he and she
did not think of such things
as they touched with such
that required no censorship,
making their own words
in speech bubbles
that float violently to the ground.

I do not write of his eyes
or of her teeth--
they, chance are, will never speak
to one another after tonight.

All she looks at are his hairs
on the nape of his neck, the pears
of his rounded shoulders taught,
catching up to her
quicksilver wit and
cheeky tongue.
She is a pear, too,
but a young and clean one.
A slendering fruit child.

Her dimples grace her lower back,
glowing a speckled hue.
He inserts delicate commas
and periods into their hushed phrases
giving the possibility of a purpose.

All my work,
he said,
has been banned.
Lady Chatterley has taken a lover,
the cock has flown the coop,
and his plumage, fire too bright
for the editors and critics,
has frightened his own writer.

To do the frightful,
he closed his eyes
and let his wayward hand
commit the criminal
curvature,
the shaping of their shadows
behind doors
flung open and
breezes sweeping over
the stuffed air to let in a--
a sight and heave of a lightened chest.