No Word for It

There’s a paradigm of friendship between females

named sisterhood,

there’s a paradigm of friendship between males

named brotherhood.

The paradigm of friendship (everything up

to but not including sex) between people

of opposite sexes is a siblinghood unnamed,

but let’s call X.

The shattered man may win sympathy

from an unaccountably friendly woman,

feel her reviving his cadaver piecemeal,

feel her magnetize selectively

the fragments of him no more posthumous –

which shards, recalling prior composition

commence re-congelation now anew,

undevastated and rejuvenated.

What present could be gentler or more tender,

what surprise could nullify such grief?

What sweeter gift than life might some girl render –

who may withhold frustrate desire’s relief?

Remember how she loved you as a human

who cannot be your lover as a woman,

return her love in kind with some acumen,

flirt up some other babe.  And watch your groomin’.

That Isis-girl who caused your resurrection

deserves your love to verge upon true X-hood:

all guys who have new life through her selection

experience enhancement of their sex-hood!

 COFFEEHOUSE TRANCE

Motto:  If the Pope is the poet of the Love God of Jealousy,

              the poet is the Pope of Desire

Sinking into trance of automatic writing,

nothing of the coffeehouse coming through

but nymph-visions passing or alighting,

the dazed transcriptionist receives the new

afflatus with confidence he’ll get it down

in efficient-est simplicity.

He sees two couples about the town

in the haven of youth’s felicity.

They start comparing parents’ love-lives:

one girl’s was riddled with infidelity,

jealous harangues tanked up in dives.

The other girl’s own folks’ terse civility

was all they could spare for one another

ever since the Mother’s found-out fling

a decade prior made just some other

platonic mockery of desire’s real thing.

Now one of the two guys being juggled by

those two girls had a Dad mostly gone

and a Mom who hooked a bit, the boy nearby

in the next room while the revels went on.

The second dude, friend of the girls’ other guy,

had parents who were ever deep in love,

met not each-other’s straying with some wry

possessive judgment, but forgave – above

all, each deferred t’other in own bod’s claims.

All four offspring, in their a-quatre menage

to remake human love, bent modest aims –

staring Venus’s decolletage….

Sinking into trance of automatic writing,

nothing of the coffeehouse coming through

but nymph-visions passing or alighting,

the dazed transcriptionist receives the new.

…