Either everything is sexual, or nothing is. Take this flock of poppies
smoke-green stems brandishing buds the size of green plums, swathed
in a testicular fur. Even those costumed in the burlesque of red crepe
petals have cocks under their skirts, powdered with indigo-black pollen,
staining everything they touch. Either the whole world is New Orleans
at 3 a.m. and a saxophone like a drill bit or it’s all clinical sunlight and sad
elementary school architecture, circa 1962, no broom closets opening into escape
hatches, no cowpokes with globs of sap skewered on hickory sticks. Either
it’s all New York in 1977, the Pan Am building lit up like a honey hive and erecting
itself out of the fog, and one of us is a junkie and one of us is naked under a gold
skirt safety pinned at the waist and the material melts in the rain, either Kinky
is playing the Lone Star and Earth is the women’s john at the tail end of the bar
and the stall doors have been blow-torched at the hinges and dragged away
by horses, either cunnilingus is an ocean salting every alleyway and lifting
every veil or the French teacher did not masturbate beneath the desk as he taught
the subjunctive, and lightning did not cleave the cherry tree and pleasure
its timbers. Either straitjacket, or shock treatment orgasm igniting the dinner theatre,
the actors cradling and hair-pulling, kissing each other so deep some might call it
brain surgery, the wigs slipping, chintz curtains aflame, codpieces bursting
into flower, or what’s left is a book of wet matches, my dear,
and it’s all been for nothing, for didn’t Jesus say you are either
with me or against me, from out of his blossom of bloodshot dust? 