This one's a little calmer.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called "Roe vs. Wade".
I just said calmer, I didn't say--
"I wonder if any male but me is still
living who remembers that pre-Roe-Wade abortionist
doctor who demanded along with his payment
a kiss, a soul kiss, as it was called then.
And isn't that what it felt like, those astounding
first times, her tongue slid warm and wet and alive
onto yours, that something you might call your soul
had been revealed?
It was another thing with that backstreet lech,
for a woman, a girl, the one who told
me had been barely eighteen.
She shuddered just to remember, in rage, or terror.
I was glad not to have been there.
This was years after.
We were in bed, we'd made love.
So live she was, with such ardor, she worked me in deeper.
I only found out later from friends that, after that one,
she'd had another adventure.
In a hotel in New York, someone with a coat hanger
she'd been told was a midwife.
Hemorrhage, infection, and she was left sterile.
As many times as we were together,
she never told me, nor told me either
that she was on dope all day, every day.
Why she trusts me with the one story,
but not the other, with her body but not
with what she was doing to it, maybe, dear thing,
she wanted to protect me.
Dear thing.