from Crude

6.

I love the smell of gasoline love
The heavy fecund enveloping fumes
Like going down on a lover the smell
Of childhood road trips Yosemite
Yellowstone of the dead time driving
Through desert my mother bracing
For impact anytime we passed
A semi love how the smell doesn’t ask
To invade your atmosphere subtle
Then sudden delicious then noxious
Impatient as my father love
That no one knows why the smell
Seduces some disgusts others like
The smell of new tennis balls or money

7.

My love loves to pop my pimples
Without asking her thumbs converging
Pinching till the red mounds burst
Or don’t stubborn little anticlines
Adding new contours to the terrain
Of my face as oil clogs up pores
Wells under the surface erupting
Under pressure a nacreous fluid
Scattering over my shocked expression
In the bathroom mirror disgusted by
Unaccustomed to this monkey nurture
I first resist then give myself over
To my love love that she finds all of me
Even what she coaxes out beautiful

8.

Crude though sweet, crude though sour,
heavy crude, light crude, crude because
unrefined, because of the earth, crude
as in inappropriate, as in unpoetic, as in
reaching a finger up a lover’s asshole, that
sulfurous tunnel, that kind of crude,
crude as a matter of taste, opinion,
breeding, crude as a brand of comedy,
crude because black, because brown,
because not white, crude because cruel
was already taken, because accrued
like wealth or power, because rudimentary,
as in in need of improvement, as in
by us, crude because we have no shame.