on pause

when a good-looking
18-yr-old boy
comes home, sometimes
he'll walk around naked.
**
then he'll head for the bathroom.
**
he knows he's gonna masturbate, and
he's looking forward to it.
**
he stands
in the bathtub where he can really
let his cum just totally splurt out,
and not worry about the clean-up. no matter
how energetically it spurts out
of him, it's easy
enough to make sure it all lands
somewhere within the confines
of the shower walls or on
the smooth white floor of the tub.
there's nothing complicated about
beating off in the bathtub.
**
then,
during the moment of pure
orgasmic ecstacy,
even the most
complex things that
are gumming up his
life just don't seem to
matter; they just
fade away for a while.
**
right after he's spurted the very last drop,
he takes a shower and just washes everything
right on down the drain.
**
compared to that kind of
simplicity, even the relatively uncomplicated act of
drying himself off
with a towel can seem like a complicated procedure.
and maybe
he should trim his pubic hair.
everyone else seems to be doing it.
it looks kinda weird, trimmed, but
that's beside the point
isn't it.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem also appears in my book Riot Act, published by Chiron Review Press in 2010.)