BIG BANG

We’re safe here in the cornball corner of
the sonnet. So you think. But we know thoughts
are mothers, breeding wantonly a love
of increase. Chaste is waste. The lewd draw lots
along the synapses. Cave paintings sprawl
across the dark walls of the skull. A Blake
engraving mates with something born to fall,
a leaf, a Troy, an Icarus, a cake.
Pandora, open sesame: a free-
for-all, a fracas, jailbait. Hell breaks loose,
a heaven forms, then morphs to universe.
We’re left to span the ambiguity.
Each stroke of genius paralyzes Zeus,
who’s bedding Kali in a wedding hearse.

__________

CHEMISTRY

Her towels are crispy with his jism. Why
this brute attraction? Music, yes, it soothes
the savage something. Late sonata, hi-
fi, stereo: ancestral fucking smooths
her dreams like butter spread on toast, appalls
like blood in milk. The dead cells? Genocide,
but Elvis made the women wet, their bawls
and shrieks an older, mammal song. “Slow ride,
take it easy”: old LP lust. Her boy-
friend knows the band. Her hands won’t leave his chest:
he’s hotter with his shirt off. “Love’s a ploy
for pulse and impulse, Mother Nature’s jest,
it’s nothing dirty or perverse,” she thinks.
He pours, then offers her the cup. She drinks.

© 2016 Tom Zimmerman

The Big Windows Review 7 (Spring 2016)