If you were not so beautiful,
large black eyes
peering down the cleavage of my soul,
tongue fire flicker of lust.
If you didn’t have melting checkerboard skin,
good twisted into evil, clever
able to lie like water quenching thirst,
offer tasty knowledge in a red, round, plump globe.
If you didn’t let me touch,
turn my fingers into loud salve
drowning out the voice in my head:
The warning. The warning.
If instead you were cuddly,
I could hold you at my bosom
like a Teddy serpent.If you were tiny, shriveled,
not long like a man’s part.
Slow too, slithering down the tree like sap,
not slick, shiny-fanged.
Or even oblong, clunky, some sort of structure
cobbled together by my-yet-to-be-born son.
And hissless, a giraffe voice or ass’s laryngitic bray.
Suppose you were not the Satan.
Then I would have laughed at you
and we would still be in the Garden
not in the burnt out vacant lot
the world is becoming.
Originally published in Spindrift