(Charles Baudelaire)


naked my darling
indulges my daydream,
wears her sonorous
bangles and trinkets,
necklets and bracelets,
a slave girl entrancing,
a panoply, a festive dance,
a flaunting splash of stones,
a sparkling soundscape’s
metal-flashing mockery as
sense-overloading sound and sight unite
in ecstasy
for me


reclining so
she lets herself be loved
languidly, smiling
down from her couch at my
sea-deep sea-sweet adoration
flowing upward to engulf her


lioness on a leash,
eyes intent on mine,
absently, abstractedly
miming a role, a
posture, another,
her lewdly spontaneous
freshness charming
fluidly flowing
lovemaking shapes,
and her legs and her arms and
shoulders, thighs,
oilgleaming wreathing
swan undulations
flow past my rapt
allseeing eyes,
and her belly and breasts,
ecstatic fruits
for my delight,
cajoling devilry
shivering my tranquillity,
jolting my crystal soul
out of cool mineral seclusion
into illusion


an adolescent boy
above, the narrow waist
swelling to the hip’s exaggeration:
see how the rouge 
glows against the tawny flesh;


and when the lamp consents
reluctantly to die,
leaving only firelight, then
every keen
flaring sigh
spills on her amber skin a flood,
a gout of flaming blood.