Girls Gone Wild

Girls gone wild
every mother’s female child
every girl, every chick, every broad
give every drip a drink

From breasts to suckle
—hands off!—to suckle
to frame and to capture
to sell and to buy and to have

Not to hold, not me
not you, not my mother’s heir
not your mother’s heir
every mother’s heir

Like a gentleman I stand
hand in pants, under the table
whose hand, whose pants, whose past
whose future wish hope dream now no

Make them wet, take them off
lift and tear and joke and take
your hat, their hat, world’s end (week’s end)
what did we she he expect?

Sex with Tina

We’ve been doing this long enough now, Tina, that even in the darkness
of this curtained hotel room I can read your skin as you slip
out of your CPA uniform. I can see the wet
on your lips, the way your lashes grasp
simple facts like: we all must die,
like: even though I’ll attempt to delay the urge to simply thrust,

to delay a moment longer the animal need to thrust,
that the animal inside rules here in the darkness,
that what’s human will roll over and die
and evolution’s demand that we share our seed, all our sins to slip
away from civilization’s desperate grasp
over how we spend our moans and roll our thighs wet

with each other, with our ancestors, wet
with forgetting what we once thought the thrust
of our life would be, to grasp
our married loves and children and hold them close in the darkness
in the rain in the snow in the wind, careful not to let them slip
from our protecting arms, at least to let us die

together, as a family. When did that dream die?
When did we start driving separate cars to this room with its wet
carpets to rub against each other, clothed, then undershirt and slip,
then naked save in the lies our sex can thrust
right through, the only light in our souls’ darkness,
your hips the only thing I can grasp,

afloat as I am in a sea of— I don’t know if I can’t grasp
the nature of this sea or if admitting my knowledge will make me sink, die,
settle in the silt and shells and darkness,
my flesh dissolving into the sea, my bones wet
in these unidentified waters as— but no. Just thrust.
There is only you, Tina, in this hotel world, and let’s not slip

into remembrance of the lives we slip
away from here. Let’s not remember the promise nor grasp
the implication. Let’s ignore the thrust
of honesty, the relentless knowledge that we, as a we, must die.
Let’s pretend the water on our faces is the sweat of lust; we’re not wet
with regret; we’re not trapped in manufactured darkness.

So this one final time, let me slip into your darkness,
let me grasp your shoulders wet
with perspiration. Thrust together our souls and let us die.

Theric Jepson is the author of the novel Byuck and the novella Perky Erect Nipples---both of which are much better behaved than these poems. 

Image: From Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games, 2013