Awful Sexy Bones

The human being's body's ability to absorb
pleasure does this dispatch concern, that,
& whole whiles spent exorcising in quiet
some sense, freshly stretched to reconform

to one pre-pleasure state wherein a conch
shell can be seen as the black-water cavity
it is and not as the ghost-ridged nativity
it is from which the pulpy gastropod launches

itself in some inborn attempt to evolve
& die or die. Because, woman, can my
body ever absorb it. Octopi
are close kin to these snails but solve

their missing mail by other, freer, means:
camouflage; a flurry of deeper ink—
+, having no skull, one can shrink
& pass through as small an opening

as the one you call your ear. A medium one
could, at least, but doubtful all those eight
appendages would be well penned-in, which might
make you Medusal. Already I am as stone.

Copyright © 2003 Ben Doyle All rights reserved
from The Canary River Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission