Kevlar Jockstrap

Many a flower expends with regret
Its scent as sweet as a secret
In solitudes profound.
— Charles Baudelaire (Charles Baudelaire, “XI. Misfortune,” Stanza 4, Lines 1–3 (Lines 12–14 overall), in “Spleen and Ideal” of “The Flowers of Evil [1861]” in The Flowers of Evil: Translated by Nathan Brown, published at London by Verso in 2024; page 79. Parallel text in French: «Mainte fleur épanche à regret / Son parfum doux comme un secret / Dans les solitudes profondes.»)

For Sergeant L—— M——
     of the Halifax Regional Police—

               «Je désire, donc je suis.»

                          i.

C   reated sick and commanded
   to be well, the
way vice serves to
exert in our world
Nature’s purpose, surrounded by

a cradle of cliffs,
how shadow flowers deserts
with wounding echoes rounding
boundless oblivions no edges
inhibit, now dusk admonishes

its listeners to never
be deaf to my
desire, yet another reminder
that all virtue does
is convince us to

                          ii.

strip off our armour
in the heat of
battle, just because the
wit of spite pleases
more than love does,

ever the Arch-Cynic of
its touch’s blush I
perpetually distrust, navigating Drake’s
Passage is analogous to
surviving love’s disastrous damage,

proudest, instead, of my
unconventional beauties who call
me king, to be
always their melancholy emperor
of convicts, rewarding grotesquery

                          iii.

engorged, I am here
only to offer my
captor, enraptured in his
Kevlar jockstrap, wearing the
stature of an officer

stripped of all his
honour, our taboo’s broken
mirror, asking him, Man,
do you know the
sweet language of such

sickly flowers as me?
Are you even aware,
Sir, that yours is
but a mistranslation of
a lost relic’s absent

                          iv.

power? That we are,
together, better than brazen
criminals raging against our
individual natural states, apes
playing parts in their

satire, ancient evils living
in sweating flesh, encountering
countless hours in the
singular embrace of this
Byzantine place, this Babylon

negating law’s weight as
one thrown shape we
gravitate closer toward ecstatic
disgrace with the blistering
dizziness and boisterous dissonance

                          v.

of pleasure’s palpitating pace,
trepidatious as assailant and
apprehender, pig and prisoner,
taking no break from
breaking in and wearing

out each other as
tempestuous waves do against
the norms whose conformity’s
enforcement we both hate?
Face me, then, as

you take the spate
of my spent seed
buried deep between spread
cheeks as my thrust
articulates its haste through

                          vi.

this cell’s bars, its
torn iron lace, our
violence vibrates, envious as
hot scars awash in
ashes and spit, for

sheer ferocity is our
total dictate, our sole
motivation as grunts chorus
to erase from memory
utterly the sacred name

of the system whose
injustice this lust of
ours works to disgrace
by disorientation, by disgust
disambiguating, by exposing to

                          vii.

strangers awaiting their voyeurism’s
justification the way fantasies
policed eventually manifest and
molest the very society
its illusion of safety

humiliates, make then the
scandal enormous, big enough
no stare’s bullets can
miss the solitary freedom
of libertinage experienced in

the prison of a
poem’s brief sentences, edging
past madness bleeding fragrance
ink carries away as
witness to sick taste!

               «Toute passion négligée est un crime.»

Jono Borden

Jono Borden is a Canadian poet, novelist, lyricist, screenwriter, and filmmaker known for transgressive lyricism, occult symbolism, gothic æsthetics, dark eroticism, and experimental narrative forms.

https://jonoborden.com
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This Isn’t a Ritual