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.)