Fear

This is an old poem I wrote on a challenge for the (now-defunct) erotic poetry blog, Wet Poems. I never posted it here before, nor did I claim authorship for it on that blog. I guess I was always–appropriately enough for the title–somehow afraid to. Today I was looking for it on that blog only to realize that the entire blog is no longer. I also found out that there is an audio file on the web of the one time I read it in public (the web is good like that):http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Queering-Language.html
So I though I might as well give it a home here…

Some days I try to catch up with my fantasies
and sleep with people I don’t know.
Not sleep, really; we’d both be standing,
more hurried than a dream,
and we’d smell, too.
But for a few minutes
we’d get a glimpse of the lives we don’t live,
lips we could have gotten used to tasting,
skin new to our own.

Turns out it felt so good
because there was blood in my semen.
It burned the next morning,
like fear–sparkling, brilliant and red.

Because we invite fear,
pressing groins against cold slab,
reaching for where it is shaved,
and very real,
knees on terrazzo,
gagging for the first time.

“Where?” he said,
“Here,” I pointed with my face.

It smelled different,
another scent of bleach.
My skin absorbed in the dark–
taught, tingling, tender.

I carried the void within me,
clenching it like a preemie,
just another form of love.
Sometimes fear is when it happens.

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