i.

The only charges that
stick are those ivory
drops of electric light
thrown off by throbbing heads

drooping after dripping
onto sweltering flesh
scorches of passionate
burn nights like these steal from

dusk until dawn returns
to take its fill of that
temple’s treasury whose
columns are as candles

melted by a waxing
moon, this happening of
two souls cruising to come
together in the crude

backwoods groves where, bloomfuls
of rusting brush rustling
under thick-whispered breath
threatening invectives,

polemics blaspheming
against love’s novices’
religious adherence
to lurid modesty,

                    ii.

to cultivate the dimmed
honesty of trimmed-wicked
flickering fantasies
to full thrust, gilded boughs

broken under weight of
trampling foot and anguished
anticipation soon
to be sated, languish

unashamed not to blush
at men whose obscene deeds
they overlook, thinned limbs
withered with age, sagging

trees and flagrant sutures
of thorny bush crushed by
boots going over their
coarse home, pelts overgrown,

panting ravenous paths
onward past this toward
myth, an underwhelming
ecstasy destined to

never last, how near here
desire leads those who, once
led by its pursuit, end
in oblivion and,

                    iii.

envious of our swoon,
our shadows move, two wounds
unaccustomed to the
encroaching jade, for skin

forsaking things earned from
experience to thieve
same old ones in exchange
for seeming, if only

once all over, again
something new, ruse to which
reality responds
with sobriety’s doom,

forgetful shells of nude
bodies attuned to heat’s
rhythm pursue primal
memory as, in the

purple chill of autumn’s
enfolding evening,
they follow our fall to
knees the soil knows well, that

lewd due of tolled tale old
carnal knowledge taxed would
rather other fellows
tell, lest, indebted to

                    iv.

its bewitching spelling
fizzling out, this wicked
sexual ritual’s
repetition serve then

only to sell sin’s old
converts on settling for
unusual roots down
on through to the same hell

all true perverts worth their
burdens’ loosening, the
lessening of their prudes’
lessons’ moral and dull

influence over their
actions, enter after
enough little deaths to
paint with its pale pallor

over lust’s fleeting flush,
nothing accomplished but
feasting on the same last
ditch carcass every

other vulture before
has chanced on, picked at, and
pecked until sated by
prophecy selves fulfill.