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Poetry

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Child’s Play
by Earl Coleman

I am an ancient cunnilingual tiger burning bright
enough to spoil this saucy ingenue
for anybody else’s tried and true. She’s
paradiddling on my back with dainty feet

and snatching me where hair and neckline meet
so that I’m damn near suffocated in the stew
of sweat and hair and cum as she thrusts up
to me and blows her cork a second time.

I know to slow, to gently kiss her thigh,
until she’s finished pulsing. Now
she’s motionless, lets loose a grateful sigh
from tattered lungs as though she’s coming up

for air (while I’m the one who’s smothered there).
At last she moves, uncoils, and we can peel
away each cell from soaking cell,
one wild ride done for, now we’re side by side.

There is no way for her to know I’m fifty-six
and counting coup, afraid I’ll soon face sixty-four
and few to need or feed me then while as for her,
she’s early twenties with the world to go.

She kisses my still plastered lips and then without
a pause she slides below to kiss the nether pole
so she can show her aptitude and skill as though
it is her aptitude itself that thrills (perhaps it is).

She’s not an expert but she is no amateur
and there I go in much too brief a time, a tad
too soon as always (always sad to climax, half
the fun or more is breathless tension getting there).

How will I slake my hungry maw –
is there some flaw of character imbued me with this greed,
some childish need that’s led me to a thousand bodies, more,
and leaves me prostrate always at love’s door.

And she, she puts her hands upon my chest and in
the darkness where we’re nose to nose she says
“They told me you are part of growing up. They
told me true. I’ve made good use of you.”


© Copyright 2001 by Earl Coleman except as indicated. All rights reserved.
For reprint permissions contact Earl Coleman,
emc@stubbornpine.com.