Contest Winner for O&C's First Erotic Poetry Contest, September 2006
Comfortable by Seth Aronson
One hot night was enough for me and Miss Grammar,
that long-haired temptress who dances across my
poems with wisps of blue pencil and red finger nails,
chiding me for misplaced dashes and ill-used commas
in a voice that suggests Mary Poppins having phone sex.
One hot night was all we needed -- it was agreed.
We wouldn't make it as a couple: she's not the type to put up with dirty laundry
on the living room floor and I'm not the type to wash the windows every Sunday.
But, after a night of tweaking verses and caressing stanzas,
while drinking red wine from ceramic coffee mugs, I finally
kept the promise I'd been teasing her with through a damp
and rainy season of Friday night revisions:
I broke out the handcuffs from my bedside night table
and she offered me her pale wrists without hesitation,
surrendering to brass bars, burgundy bed sheets and a
cranberry candle that she'd bought for my birthday.
She seduced me with well-phrased curses as
I slowly parted the blue-buttoned folds of her
silk blouse and then unlaced her jet-black bra.
She called me an animal, a monster, an over-sized brute
who was too dependent on alliteration as I stripped her
of her belt, then her boots, then her bell-bottom blue jeans
and then kissed my naked editor in the quivering cranberry light,
my golden-haired Miss Grammar, my slender muse of proper usage,
who had glided across my verse-dreams in dashes of blue-streaked tango;
now I would reciprocate with a ballet of soft bristles and
red body paint -- a candle-lit dance of scarlet punctuation
on a sheet of untouched parchment suddenly turned to flesh:
I sent graceful circles of semi-colons spinning around her coffee nipples
that trembled in goose bump rhythms as metal chains scratched a handcuff groove --
urgent ovals of dashes erupted from each armpit before
I dotted her staccato-breathing belly with a rash of raspberry periods;
her navel was a perfect point for a mark of exclamation,
as were her two semi-coloned nipples -- brown and berry interjections flared
from both of her tits as each toe twitched from the curve of a comma and
her thighs dashed and darted in a frenzy of hyperactive hyphens and
she begged for me to fuck her, but I waited until crimson-hooked question marks shimmied in moist clusters around her shaved pink lips before plunging in --
a mosh of spilled body paint and last-chance candle light that, for once, left both of us without
words
Originally published September 2006 - "Divine"