And blow, blow dust off an enfeebled spine,
Filling lungs with belletristic grime.

We offer each other a dark
brew. But we must drink.
A seduction is the setting up

I arrive gasping, my head on your thigh
the head of a drowning man, a shipwrecked man

I got the call at 4 a.m. David said that he’d been up
since three. “It’s bad, man,” he told me on the phone.
“Just talked to the Head Guy. They’ve botched surrealism,

Why are they looking at me with such hate?
Why can’t I just remember what I said?

How she loved that passage, even though one of “them”
had written it. But James was different: He could see
how women think—and how most men aren’t able to.

A man makes a film. 
He is a Jew, a midwestern
Jew, from Cincinnati.

So bondage is a big part of it, after all—
that old art of rendering a lover submissive:
a tactic, a strategy. Denying somebody’s body

  He remembered how she’d fling her hair. And the moon …

Kenneth noticed a man staring at breasts,
the way he, Kenneth, might look at an ass.
Kenneth felt a solidarity of need.