Daniel Edward Moore

Self-Help with Gaping Mouth

In the same way revolution’s

catastrophic condom

had no power to silence

the god forsaken story

your body had to tell.

Fanning the coal in a therapist’s heart

with sweaty palms and Enya songs,

childhood was a frozen lake

with holes used by hairy men

devoted to the art of fishing.

Getting hooked was easy.

Thrown back even better.

It depends on how many scales need a knife

to stop giving the bucket

a reason for being.

Or that’s how you’ll remember it,

self-help with gaping mouth.

Tell Me We’ll Never Get Used to It

1.

The mailman arriving kind and exhausted stripping

his truck of Amazon boxes, the cardboard nearly

melting from incendiary content: a vibrating cock ring

prostate massager, the bed restraint kit with adjustable

cuffs and a pink lace lingerie one piece Teddy to go

with my leather half chest harness that came all the way

from China with love.

2.

Our devoted attendance at The Saturday Church

where the bedroom becomes a sexual wilderness

and the only intention is to praise what we find

in the act of worshipping lost. This is not a day of rest.

No one prays to be saved.

3.

The way a prisoner wakes up every day loving

the guard’s vascularity, those hot blue highways

of memories abandoned beneath an overpass of scars.

We were born to crash into power and safe

is a cute little adjective strapped in a car seat

sucking their thumb, oblivious to a leather boot

on the gas plunging them deeper into the world,

one lost binky at a time.

4.

Like her longing for crows that drank from a bird bath

made in the shape of a heart, their absence

a visceral reminder of how bored the mind

quickly becomes when nature’s black scarves

of dirty silk fade from the air without warning.

Leather

Just couldn’t let your eyes go,

                like horses corralled by Tiffany fences

blown into beauty by calming the wild.

While the rest of the herd ran hard & free

            into pungent rooms of whiplash renewal

your imagination asked to meet mine,

& the dangerous me tied the delicate you

          with the flesh of cows from August fields

held by the moon’s lasso.

Even pretty glass loves a cowboy’s broom,

                        or that’s what I thought you said.

The blinking never stopped.

Double Bluff Beach

Prepare for the consequences,

the way a victor

crowned with clouds

is grateful for the storm’s

testosterone bravado.

Like seagrass and it’s

acreage of swoon,

crushed beneath men

stacked like books,

flesh made the pages

easier to turn,

on the night’s

shore of fists.

A little more gorgeous

on the outside,

the dunes were

heard to say,

as salty prayers

from every mouth

served the raw

with tenderness

as dry and thirsty lips

were opened by

the foaming tide.

Our Best Friends

are swingers with biblical names,

Mary, Paul, Peter, and James,

and the always volatile Samson and Delilah,

scissoring us in beds, round as wafers,

prepared to be broken by liturgical lap dance,

by legs opening wide like the Red Sea did,

swallowing desire’s enemies whole.

Cut from the same cloth of lust,

it’s easy to hear the skin unravel,

begging the holy to breathe like it does,

begging the mouths of strangers to praise

what otherwise goes untouched.

God forbids that, here in in this house,

where the bold brick and mortar of safe words allow

the body’s religion to be lost in the wilderness,

like John the Baptist praying for a ride

to bring his prophecy home.