3 POEMS

By Eric Cline

GREEN GRASS / FREE SHIT

Green grass! Free shit! Air that doesn’t taste too bad! No
smoke anywhere in sight! Geese, or at least the same
hills and same sides of same roads where I saw them in
their season! The memory of geese! Their feet, their
heads, their middle sections shaped like I don’t know what!
Packages? Their eyes! Terror! How lovely. I think
about geese all the time! Blue! Water in the air

reflected, everything a reflection! We stare
at the water too, air’s touch upon it! To drink
is to grow thine self, fill thine own shell! I love smut!
Men inside each other! To overhear a pair
of them in the room next to mine! Building within
my own body: sense of empty! Ravenous! Blame
the sound of their slaps! I spread! My hole winks! “Hello!”

THINGS I WANT WALT WHITMAN TO DO TO MY ASSHOLE

Lick it like penny candy bought with the bounty
of his labors, the sweat of his brow, savoring
my salts and my sugars. Finger its inner walls
apart like folds of skin on one of his boys’ arms;
fish for bullets, bob against something else. With those
same digits, continue to spread: brush open tent
flaps and come face to face with he who would give what

remains of his body for aid, relief. Give glut
of knuckles, never rationing his sweat. Relent
to its beckoning song, the song of comrades, throes
of passion let loose as cannonfire. That which harms
pleasantly, with medic’s knowledge of which pain calls
for more. Slide his whole cock in with unwavering
force; conscript moans men will hear in the next country.

SUPERORGANISM

O saint of sodomy annointed! O marquis
of mischief exploited! O body pressed Christlike
upon thine bed: head crowned in thorns mine, two bare feet
as helpless as my hands, the only cloth in sight
a piss-soaked shred of modesty! O silk askant,
o expulsion of the body, o yellow sheen!
O indulgence of the body, o holy moan! 

Why playact a preacher when I could be a drone?
Why speak as intermediary when a queen
would brook no higher god nor lower thinking ant?
Why, if all be as they will, should I view as plight
the catching of a bug with open hand? Why treat
what I want as what I must not do? Why, alike
as I am to as I was, must you condemn me?

Eric Cline is a poet. His chapbooks include his strange boy eve (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), something farther across the ocean (Throwback Books, 2017), cicada shell: life in a queer body (Tenderness Lit, 2018) and The Temporary (forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press). A more extensive bibliography can be found at https://ericclinepoet.neocities.org/.