Free from intrusion - Poem by Ivan Donn Carswell

You awaken this time with a welcoming smile, an experience
sublime, not a dream – the boner from Hell
has presented itself like a prospect of fate, and reasoned
debate be damned, you’ll argue its merits later.

These things used to be so ordinarily a part of each wake-up
and every soaring lewd thought that you’d ever had
(and never considered of much ado until they dwindled away),
but somehow they just can’t be brought like that – nowadays.

While the thrill in wanting arms is still as real and endearing
as it was ever in your youth, what remains is a raw parody
of cheerless arousal, an urge that either fails to materialise
or has a sad sequel sans denial in a swathe of prosthetic cocktails.

However the time for reflection is passed, this erection is stealing
a march, a loaded gun pressed to the cheeks of good
reason, demanding admission at any price, commanding
a lunatic pride with its rampant, non-negotiable commission.

If you recalled past failures with the same bitter irony installed
where spontaneous enjoyment used to be you would call
your erection a subversive uprising, a potentially indecent
crime in the making, an affectation of masculinity impaired.

It shouldn’t surprise, your partner who’s faking a deep, dreamless
sleep is wise to the vagaries of your being a man in decline, and
while this is stroking your ego and heedlessly seedy sense of needy
maleness she’ll close her mind to it and demurely keep her peace.

But you are not free to pursue the sensual pleasures implied
by a mad-headed rigidness of thought and fixated flesh anyway,
this naïve ingénue with no sense of timing but the opportunistic
and execrably blue doesn’t rule you today, or any other day.

Do you take the irony out of ‘a grand geste’ and make it less sour
while you cogitate its aptness of design to intrude and intertwine
with the pleasures of night, mindlessly blind to a growing awareness
that shows early hours bliss of repose knows no limits in anger?

It will suffer the danger its presence proposes, inherent with chills of displeasure
disposing indignant dissent; perhaps it was meant as a glimpse of salvation,
an awareness that life is but self preservation, and a wife whose desires are
not less than stress free will sleep in seclusion, free from intrusion,

– provided you reach the same conclusion.
© I.D. Carswell