PROS AND CONS

                                            Will de Kypia

   In Praise of Promiscuity

   Bless the chaste lovers, bless and protect them,

   all those who rise up in heat, lie down in lust,

   then coldly uncouple in guilt and disgust.

   May they cast off judgment along with their

   garments lest they realize that the carnal carnival

   is but one night of sport preceding a perpetual Lent.

   

   Domesticate passions, temper ecstasy,

   avert their eyes when they dress so

   the pain of parting might be less.

   Bless the chaste lovers, modestly and briefly.

   Contra Viam Mediam

   Consider the leopard, a carnivore.

   She eats raw meat, no mango muck for her.

   Chases gazelle across the desert and feasts.

   Be you like her a beast.

   Or eat nothing more wicked than the mildest sins

   of little children, nothing coarser than the souls

   of saints, nothing less pure than nothing at all.

   But do not desecrate the flesh of Mother Earth.

   Rend not with horrid implement her bearded fig and

   lush honeydews. Ape neither ghouls who raise armies

   of maize to die like golden warriors, nor those brutes

   who with phallic pestle and vulvar mortar do grind to

   dust blameless spices and the most innocent of herbs.

   Bestial or angelical, the choice is yours.

   There is no middle way.

   The Man Who Would Be Green

   Alone in his kitchen he slices a tomato, slices it

   very thin. He licks the juice from the blade, tosses

   the slices onto the compost heap with yesterday's.

   He grieves for bees inhumanly hived. Yearns to absorb

   the sun's nourishing rays with chlorophyll-rich skin,

   or to imbibe an immaculate sustenance from air.

   He will die a scowling rictus in a bad winter.

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