Skeet Shoot
by Robert Burdette Sweet
Sex is for propagation, I remind myself
while you willy-nilly throw eggs I wildly blast at:
in the ripped back seat of my Chevy,
nestled in the sparse-grassed dunes,
in a telephone booth at midnight lighted by the glitter of rain,
even wrapped in my bed's rumpled sheets. It's like a skeet shoot
where clay disks sprung from traps imitate flying birds,
a game (despite my terrible aim and your spastic releases)
as brutal and lovely in all its implications
as the fresh death we obsessively seek
to detonate into being.
Yet when the kill has been dispatched,
(shards of shattered clay ping from clouds,
faux feathers twist through air to earth)
and we only want to shoot and be shot
again, how then can sex be solely procreation
when what we've done we only want to do again,
the goal never satisfying the desire.
We're doomed, you and I, to a fate
no animals made rampant by the scent of estrus
need contemplate. Sex for us is art,
art derives from sex, and that's all we really need to know.
Remember when we couldn't distinguish who was who,
until there was no you or me there to tell us what to do ...
and all taboos dissolved in a wash of final affirmation,
an apotheosis of groins, a sanctification of humors, rheums and ichors
while our nerves wove branching out through windows
into the rain, the sleet, over flowered fields of sun
and along the seething sewers of divinity ...
to where semen is a weeping of redundant tears
of the distressed All-knowing, and an ovum the knowing
stressed to conceive in tears? And if play be art, art must be sex,
especially of the narrative kind. Text critical autopsy:
Conflict -- ourselves against ourselves. Taboo -- that there should be none.
Genre -- fantasy, of course. Significance -- after eating
and disposing of what we've eaten, it's what's next of all there is.
Structure -- a languidly prolonged climactic scene
emphasized by the orgasmic ratification of personal unimportance.
Style -- dictated due to ego-loss, schizophrenia redux.
Originality -- you've got to be kidding.
So sex is art, art sex; this is our undoing and transcendence.
Trust yourself not to trust your trust.
The skeet shoot, the sport and craze of imploding discs
of clay and porous membranes (I pray to miss,
you opt for a slam) may shatter to death,
my dear, the feathered grace of our faux love.
Yet know however disparate we become,
the art of swapping fluids made us one.
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