Human Rights

In a time of global financial crisis, who has time to think about human rights, nevermind the rights of people halfway around the world?

The Art of Lying

Not seduction—this is lying.
One must not be so lascivious
and thus no overt attention
to the chest, no thrusting movements
or arching of the back
luring the Caesars and Mark Anthonys
to your lair.
This isn’t fanatical drama.
No one is demanding anything of you
and you don’t need to
demand anything of yourself.

It is best if you allow the tightrope
of your body to be slackened
and let the stiffness crumble away to
the softness of untoned flesh.
Perfections is best achieved, as with
many forms, if you strip away the barriers.
The Egyptian cotton sheets
may not be forgiving, wrapping the whole
thickness of your thighs that remind you:
You are no longer twenty or even thirty
It was sixteen years and twenty something
pounds ago when you felt comfortable
in your own skin. But it is precisely
because you aren’t trying to be
a temptress anymore that the love
handles are alright. What else
is that nebulous emotion
going to hold on to?

It’s not so calculated as posing,
though there are positions.
One arm raised above your head,
circling as a wreath of a victor.
The other arm is at your side
hand gracefully resting on the bed
with your smallest finger
just a few molecules more
separated from the others.
A wisp of dark hair flows across your forehead,
one of the crucial ingredients—allowing
gravity to create
incidental aesthetics.

The beauty is cheating time
and restoring yourself
presenting yourself to be taken
again. Because you are lying
and waiting for the viewer to extract
and smell, taste and touch
your heart, deciding your desires
very palatable, though a little
too sweet, too soft, lacking in
substance perhaps,
but not lacking in poetics.
Only after he leaves and
all your insides are in jars,
labeled and categorized,
will you be mummified in all your opulence
and become the artform itself.