(come to the tumble for accompanying saucy imagery)
Commuting to make love
What a dull day without tea
and something filthy.
Fluorescent coquettes, the lights
wink, blush pink and dim the deeper
you go. Lashes flutter involuntarily
from industrial fans, a post-apocalyptic
runway. Handrails polished
to stripper pole. You can chuckle darkly,
the third rail is but your emory board.
En route to rendez-vous, re-hickey, spill
petals from mouth, pants to floor.
Who can wait for nightfall?
Sensually electric enough to feel
the static in your pubic hair,
every zipper pull, button hole aches
to be the swaggery stranger
who can strike up a conversation
at the top of an escalator. By the bottom
have your hand at their waistline, rear
pocket, slipping your card inside.
Shake green feathers from plump leather
wallet and purse wine lips as you plan
your next cunning sext-txt reply.
Galloping toward, my sweet. I’m coming.
Drizzled in honey. Maybe that’s part
of it, the eroticism of the play, replay
on your mental movie projector.
Props, costumes, whip, gestures of the last kiss
-ing scene of tangled hair, you can stare
through your bangs, pretend it’s theirs
until the ding of doors lets you
aboard. Check bruises discreetly,
how tender your thighs as you hold
your phone lap-level. When the doors
seal shut with that disconcerting
alien/familiar sucking sound
you’re off through a Freudian
dark tunnel, rushing alone thinking
of that first moment you won’t be.
One half, a crescent moon with a bite
taken out. The arrow that quivers,
waiting to be buried. The red line
thunders and the shocks register
via morse code to pubic bone— the person
across from you biting down a frown,
feeling the swelled exterior, stretched
taut outlines of their overnight bag.
Checking by Braille for familiar shapes
cookie-cutter swells of condoms, safety razor,
corset boning. We all commute (sometimes
great lengths) to make love.
On the train’s springless benchseats,
in basements/studios’ futons on floors,
the bass thump through your mons pubis.
Your damp grip on metro coins,
subway cards, the ticket collector’s air
as non judging as the family planning
aisle at the pharmacy. (One family fare,
you be the kid on the train, baby.) You feel
each turn in the track through your jeans
crotch, the turbulence of sex
memories, solitary daydreams.
And that’s ok— the public display,
transportation’s tantric delay.
The journey ~ more foreplay.
+
by your poetesss
originally mika gave me the experience of intentionally turning someone on/mr. bowie’s codpiece as poem-prompt options. the former evolved into the sexual experience of being out in public totally fixated on a rendez-vous a deux to come. (i even told mika at a cafe939 show when this change took place…i’ve been working on this poem for a while!) well this went through 6 different .doc drafts and i still think it’s got a lot in it i can continue to write about :) i also discovered (after this being the third one) i write sexy subway poetry. what’s up with that? Tubephilia?
Behind the scenes by David Aquilina :)
