The Tamed Puma

You are mistaken, he said

I am neither lecher nor womanizer.

If I'm crazy about women

it's for the beauty

some pitying devil threw over them,

a beauty that blinds my gaze to everything

except lips eyes breasts

and roils my blood

like a delicious venom.

When the fit is on me

I am their slave, their man Fiday;

they can do with me as they will

and to their absurdest wish

I am as malleable as putty,

more pliant than straw.

For their ally is not beauty alone

but the scantness of sense or purpose

I find in the remotest curved niche

of the universe;

whoever framed its empty immensities

didn't reckon on a man's reason or conscience

or the unassuageable ache in my heart.

Women and poems are my sole chance here

to give expelled breath shape and contour

and fable it with meaning.

I place on the brow of every woman I love

a crown made from the choicest words;

I dress her like a woodland queen

in trope and metaphor.

My desperation blossoms into garlands

braceleting her wrists, my sick despair

into flowering anklets.

I plug the void with my phallus

and making love on bed or carpet

we transfigure pitchblack nothingness

into a tamed puma whose whiskers

we stroke between enrapturing kisses.