The ominous klaxon wails as boots drum steel. Seatbelts are clacking among the hurried professional murmuring. My mental-checklist rolls tape automatically within: flashgear-check, gasmask-optimal, headset audio-go, mic-check good. My scope hums into action, glowing green and amber.
“Weps, One online,” squawk my butterflies, as I note the surface contact sent to me automatically by my boss. It’s beyond gun range, but it’s streaming right for us. A single anti-ship missile would hastily end its aggression, but we can’t launch a preemptive strike without just cause. And so, we wait.
“Weps, aye,” boss booms in acknowledgement, adding, “Surface-action port-side, bearing 279-relative…”
Breathe
“…Renegade gunboat coming in hot… not responding to our hails… I guess the pirates wanna play…”
Rely on your training. You got this.
“…Batteries-tight. Do not fire unless fired upon, but stay frosty, ya got me? We got this.”
“One, aye,” I reply.
And now we wait.
the heavens shriek red
dawn or dusk, our plight unknown
now gird your courage
***
She missed it earlier
but examining the November storm
from behind the sanctuary of
coffee-sweetened kitchen window,
before the late-fall deluge wiped evidence,
wispy-warm poems rose
from every chimney vent
clear to the far tree-line, each
an ascending esoteric-buttressed declaration
of internal warmth and acceptance.
She smiled,
squeezing me extra tight
as the rain shushed the trees,
shooed the expelled steam-dancers,
obscured the looking-glass,
embracing the roof overhead
with white noise.
We observed the rain in silence.
Seizing the moment
would’ve been ideal; instead,
we let it breathe,
the evergreens and barren trees,
the chimney vents and fogging panes,
she, embraced by me,
all exhaling in equanimous unity.
***
sunset spies our pose ephemeral
second-hand glides a blushing sky
nectar merged near hip-femoral
the hands reside, each on a thigh
though breathing strained, there slips a sigh
there slips a plea to make it fall
broad, gentle strokes now urgent, coarse
tongue strikes nerve; it ignites our squall
as hands kneed flesh, chorus falls hoarse
ripe shadow probed, more we endorse
***
I enjoy tinkering with new forms, and Grace suggested that we could even apply the form to another desire and sexuality theme similar to the Poetics: Desire and Sexuality in Poetry prompt I wrote Concentric Snapshots for earlier this week.
I mean, I certainly could use a few distractions, and what’s a better distraction than a little smutty poetry between friends, right? And it’s not even that smutty! 😉
Two new high school grads
our duet, playing at probing,
experimental love;
clumsily grasping
at the third rail,
illuminating our
respective darkness,
calling the freshly found
fool’s gold
love eternal.
II.
Victims of circumstance, we
circled the idea as
adults consenting at this
scandalous dispelling of intent, this
instinctive discontent
sucking at the plea; a need
we’d already met
in spirit if not deed, she,
splayed and braced
for our forbidden crossing,
forever eroding a
gold-pressed
promissory note
as false idol.
III.
Never bothered catching her name;
would’ve fumbled it away anyway
in the aftermath of two bored barflies
stalling to return to our respective
counterfeit lives, finding life and little
deaths pressed between, rubbing for wishes,
but granted only golden gilded-guilt.
IV.
Last night with her was…
last night was…
it was… have you ever
in all your
quarter-century-plus of life
been so sure of someone,
so secure in her warmth,
so open to your own vulnerability
so overeager to overflow,
to explode,
to lose containment of self,
spilling onto
and into her essence
until you forget
where you end
and she begins? Like… you know…
uhm… like two novice glassblowers
playing in molten golden sands,
you both know it’s real and urgent
and wonderful, and powerful and… and…
…and inevitably,
one or both of you
will still shatter it
once it cools.
Anyway,
it was like that
with her.
V.
There was something
within this sad, soulful
old-soul lonely eyes
that fleetingly
stole her soul
from her fiancé
for an afternoon delight
that never happened; that was
her story anyway after
entering a bachelor’s loser-loft,
asking for a glass of water
she never drank a drop of,
spilling it on the night-stand
next to her thirst and
a certain creaking
secret-spilling mattress
and I can’t say if anything
she moaned into my ear
was gospel, but truth is,
sometimes
seeking that golden sandy fullness
leaves us spent, wrought
with emptiness.
VI.
Neither of us
are in the mood,
molecules moving
a bit slower with age
and still,
catching me
admiring her hips,
she wiggles a spark my way,
igniting knowing smirks
encircling in decaying orbits,
concentrically spinning
towards collision
saying inflammatory things like,
“I thought you were sleepy?” and
“What you wanna do?”
with knowing grins,
knowing the answer
before it begins with
clumsy grasping of our third rail,
transmuting darkness into
golden hues.
***
Initially, I was going to skip this one and just exist within my depression for a minute, but then I began reading everyone’s steamy contributions, and as Bjorn predicted, I became inspired for some reason. *heh*
Passion and sexual desire are often their own reward, but I thought it might be interesting to examine the fact that often these desires don’t exist within a hermetically-sealed bubble. Sometimes indulging is great and the circumstances wonderful, and sometimes the whole sultry exercise may be wrought with symptoms of a deeper need.
No judgments here! Lord knows I’m not qualified to judge anyone. I just thought it might be interesting to play with circumstances.
I enjoyed writing for this prompt. It pulled me from my doldrums for a bit. 🙂
you were acting unruly
willfully testing boundaries
as I patiently corrected
your older sister mocked you
and so I scolded her too
gently, sans needless cruelty
not as I had been brought up
but as I have learned to nurture
cause “know better, do better”
you and your big sis smile warmly
thanking me for caring enough-
I awake to dark cold silence
reality is your absence
your step-sis is a stranger
I’m a faded family picture
ignorant to your hopes and dreams
I’m bone-cold in black spaces
that will never know warmth again
but I deserve this mild penance
for failing to fight for you
I pray that moonlight blesses you
bloom from the many moons I missed
I was stopped for speeding earlier this week, and justifiably so, unless the cop was just profiling every black guy who just happened to be going 43 in a 25mph residential area. (I was late for work. That’s no excuse for driving like a menace, but it is a valid reason.)
In the aftermath, I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for the remainder of the day. As a child, I never grasped why my family collectively feared police, but by age 45, I completely understood the subtle nuances. I laughed at the long, subtle transition of perspective, especially in this era when one false twitch can make guys who look like me into a hashtag (#BarryD #HeWasHarmless #HeWasScaredOfSpidersAndCopsAndBeingLateForWork).
My boneheaded commute had earned me a two-hundred-dollar citation, but I wasn’t lying lifeless face-down on the pavement riddled with peace-keeper rounds, so I considered it a net-win. All things considered, it was just a bad day that could’ve been far worse.
I discussed this with wifey, and she said that us humans have a one-hundred-percent survival rate during bad days. I supposed that was true, even while dismissing this as a bland “You miss one-hundred percent of the shots you don’t take” motivational slogan. But then I began to analyze this statement, and while technically true, on the occasion that a bad day is not survivable, depending on various lifespans, your bad-day survival rate drops anywhere from 90 to 99.9999 percent, which is not too shabby, all things considered.
Granted, your percentage will never again increase on account of you being dead and all.
So, you will either survive your bad day, or you will perish from it. But more often than not, you will survive it. I consider that a net-win. I told Wifey there’s a poem in there somewhere, and I hoped to fish it out. She urged me to reconsider, but you only miss one-hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.
November stormfront
frozen rain stings rosy cheeks
I blush through the grey
***
Hephaestus’ Waste & Cosmic Rubble 