Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame by Rickey Laurentiis

Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame

The way he writhed

      Beneath the other man

Argued his loneliness,

      But he wasn’t just a blank measure

Waiting to sound;

However much an O

His mouth made,

      He wasn’t just an O—

Thrusting back, up,

      Against what is almost

Like a finger, though

It isn’t, always needing

To be touched

      Like a finger, to be held:

—I’m lonely.

      My waist cinched

Inward like some vintage

Japanese fan, the clever

Blade of my back,

      Working inch-by-inch

Toward a pleasure

      Half mine, the way fire

Pleases,

Wax pleases . . .

What does possession mean?

      No, really. Tell me.

That at this moment

      Someone beside myself can feel

How many times

I shudder?

Asked if I like it,

      I like it, I speak out

Those few syllables, mess myself.

      The point is, I think,

To empty—?

It feels good.

To be two men

      Interlocked in a sentence

Still forming. We

      Danced the dance that says I want you,

Come closer,

Come in me.

No, really, he said

      As a whisper—Boy,

You want to be possessed.

      Because, you see, he’d been removed

From his body then,

Per usual,

His beauty, like a talisman, offered,

His woundedness revealed—