This next poem is kind of half parody or something.
I don't know.
It's meant to be funny.
Often when I mean to write a funny poem,
it doesn't come out too funny.
This is a parody--
I call this "An Amorous Debate."
And the amorous debate was a very popular convention
of Renaissance poetry.
And what happened in it was it was a dialogue
between a boy and a girl.
And they would always be sitting on a bank
and there would be birds singing and leaves and blossoms coming
out and all that.
And the boy would be trying to seduce the girl.
And sometimes, these are quite long poems.
The longest, I mean, the best known is "Don's Ecstasy"
but there were quite a few others.
There's one by Sir Philip Sidney "In a grove most rich of shade"
and--
oh, about six or seven others that one could identify.
And apparently this was a convention.
So I wrote this poem called "An Amorous Debate"
and the two characters in it are called Leather Kid and Fleshly.
I should say, before I start, that at the very end,
I make reference to two French rivers, the Saone
and the Rhone, which join together
and become one river at Lyon.
I think they join and they then become
called the Rhone, which is a bit unfair to the other river.
"An Amorous Debate."
Birds whistled, all nature was doing something
while Leather Kid and Fleshly lay on a bank and gleaming
disclosed like this.
"You are so strong," she said, "such a firm defense
of hide against the ripple of skin,
it excites me, all those reserves suggested,
though I do hope that isn't a prosthetic device
under your glove, is it?"
"Let's fuck," he said.
She snuggled close, zipping him open,
unbuckling away, till he lay before her a very Mars unhorsed
but not doing much of anything without his horse.
"Strange," she said, "you are still encased in your defense.
You have a hard cock but there is
something like the obduracy of leather
still in your countenance and your skin.
It is like a hide under hide."
Then she laid the fierce pale river of her body
against his, squashing her lily breasts
against his hard male nipples, inserting
her thighs between his till he fired a bit
and embracing her with some feeling moved his hand
to suck up the nearest flesh to his mouth
which turned out to be his own arm.
Then a tremor passed through his body, the sheen fell from him,
he became wholly sensitive as if his body had rolled back
its own foreskin.
He ran with sweat.
And then melted one into the other forthwith
like the way the Saone joins the Rhone at Lyon.
A bit different.