Three poems that appeared in Chiron Review, Issue 90, Spring 2010

 

how platonic

the resulting correspondence spurred him into action.
oh there was no doubt about it: he was in love
with his new pen-pal. and he was sure his new
pen-pal was just as hot and as sexy a young man
as he himself was. he could picture himself
and his pen-pal together, lying naked
in the woods, side by side, while
in fact he lay all alone by himself
naked on a towel on his belly in a secluded
spot in the woods and wrote page
after page after page after page
to his new pen-pal.  this was the
real thing, though, this time.
the real thing. oh sure his pen-pal
was a small-press editor, who lived thousands
of miles away, and who had accepted
and published several of his poems,
but, well, it went
W-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-Y-Y-Y beyond
a mere poet-editor relationship. he knew it.
his pen-pal wrote him even when there
were matters totally unrelated to
his poems and to the magazine.
his pen-pal wrote him about
life and milkshakes and chocolate
cookies and the joy of a simple
walk on the beach with the
wind blowing his tousled blond hair
to and fro.
oh yes, he was passionately in love
with his new pen-pal, and often
as he lay there naked on his belly writing
letters to his pen-pal, he would
get an insatiable and tremendous hardon, and
he just lay there, though, on top of it,
feeling the sensation of it against
his taut flat belly, as he wrote
to his pen-pal about matters totally
unrelated to sex. he was fairly
sure his new pen-pal was straight.
which could be a problem. since he
himself was gay and in fact totally
in love with his new pen-pal. but
surely this could all be worked out.
everything didn't have to be about
sex, did it? some things were just
about love. and so he lay there
on his belly his back sweaty
his pink little nipples dripping
sweat his hardon raging, and
he wrote to his pen-pal about
the movie he'd just seen,
the book he was in the middle
of reading, and then,
he kinda broke into tears,
and quickly moved the pages
away, because it was
unseemly to have tear-stains on
letters, no matter what
others may do--that was
just not him. no way.
he was much too smooth
and sophisticated for
something like that.
instead, after he finished
his cry, he added the sentence:
"I'm still in the middle
of the woods and feel a poem
coming on--I'll send it to ya
if I like the way it turns out."
then he wrote "Sincerely yours,"
and put the letter into an
envelope and sealed it up
and he lay there naked
sweaty on his belly
on top of his hardon
and even though it
seemed kind of crass
to bring sex into all
of this, he rubbed
himself against the
soft surface of the
towel until he spurted
cum and, in fact, he
spurted so much cum
that he nearly soaked his
towel, and then he stood
up, looked down, disgusted,
disgruntled, and just thoroughly
thoroughly
vexed.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem first appeared in Chiron Review, Issue #90, Spring 2010. It also appears in my book String Bean.)



the pangs of separation

spatial relationships befuddled him.
for instance:
put two people in a room, and how close are they together?
when he saw a picture of a triangle on a page,
and tried to turn the image of that triangle upside down in his mind,
what did that image then look like?
streets wound mysteriously throughout the region, the
towns, the cities, coalescing into various intersections
that gave access to a variety of dwellings or businesses
that suddenly seemed to appear, as if out of nowhere,
as if out of a dense smarmy fog.
oh yes, to this spatially-confused young man,
sexy, skinny, and wild-eyed, the way things fit
together with other things would remain
an eternal mystery. the only thing that
made any sense was the throb of his own orgasm,
the smell of another man's cum,
platefulls of boiled shrimp and brightly
colored spicy vegetables.
everything else was a mish-mash of jumbles.
and so, he lay there naked sexy and sexed-up
beside the man he loved: how close could
two people get in the same room? and
when the space between them approached
zero, what was the shape of all that
other space around them? subtract
the two of them from that space,
and what was left, that volume
that he and the other man had
occupied, suddenly available,
as it were, for intrusion.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Assaracus, Issue #16, October 2014. It first appeared in Chiron Review, Issue #90, Spring 2010.)




brushwork

and so all the leaves changed color and fall arrived.
walking in the woods became a multi-colored near-psychedelic dream.
for a shy sensitive sexy slender sexed-up young man,
it was a wonderland for masturbatory indulgence.
he walked there daily, after school, amongst
the foliage, amongst the craggy tree trunks,
crackly insects making their strange crackling sounds,
lizards skittering here and there, birds
near ultra-loud with the intensity of their
autumnal squawkings and murmurings.
the shy sensitive sexy slender sexed-up young man
took it all in, as he walked naked and
wide-eyed and wild-eyed and his big smooth
satiny dick fully erect as he walked there
amongst it all, there in the forest,
the colors vibrant, the smells of mossiness
and approaching decay. he paused often
and gave himself over fully to his masturbatory
desires, standing there in the woods
pumping on his big smooth penis,
his pink nipples sweaty and tingling,
anointing the leafy mossy moldy ground
with puddles of cum, there in the
land of techno-color and the tension
of the approaching winter lapping at
his toes, smelling his tight pink little asshole.
shy sensitive sexy slender sexed-up young man
walked on, smiling sweetly, the look
in his eyes, goofy, and wise, and wild.
there were a few droplets of shot cum
that clung to the tops of his toes,
and the rest of it dried there behind,
where he'd marked his territory like
a dog that spurted cum instead
of pee. he did it all quietly, except for the occasional
yelp of joy, there in the multi-hued forest,
before the certainty of winter.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem also appears in my book Gorilla Architecture, published by Interior Noise Press in 2011. It first appeared in Chiron Review, Issue 90, Spring 2010.)