Prepare to be excluded from common language.
She will surely find your “oh baby”s too pedestrian
and your “harder”s too banal.

Be ready to forfeit more quotidian tongues,
the boilerplate adjectives generic by design,
and, by default, the body parts mundane in their ubiquity.

Find a worthier candidate for rhapsody
than the thicket between her thighs,
than his manmeat-joystick-lovehandle-
mygodit’sjustapenis.

Write a sonnet, instead, in the pushpull of her lungs
and turn a different phrase in every breath.
Parcel his vertebrae into sharps and flats,
and play his skin like the drum its tightness suggests.

Detach your rosy goggles from the lump of flesh before you
and laugh from your gut at the sheer absurdity of arousal.

And when it’s said and done, wily foreplay vanquished,
come like Dante’s inferno,

and call me Beatrice.

*

Photo: me at 16 at the Champlain College Young Writers' Conference