marble floors

the spartan aspects of the structure were only emphasized
by the presence of athletic young men being silently and mindlessly
fucked in the big white showerroom.
outside the walls of the structure, the
mediterranean was a dazzling blue.
seagulls screached. the waves lapped the sand.
inside the spartan structure, though,
everything was plain, stark, no frills of
any kind. after the fucking,
the athletic young men ran their laps in
the sky-lit atrium and
lifted their weights in the weight room
and lifted each other in the gymnasium.
positions were both supine and prone. with
sudden and yet unhurried bursts of pure vertical energy.
later that day, everyone ate in silence
in the light-less dining room,
as the sun descended into the sea; then,
it was off to their narrow thin-sheeted
cots, where no one slept alone,
and the snoring was almost music.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)