Sperm live for five days:
like mayflies, swarming for a lover.
This is romantic, isn't it, sperm
like mayflies —
Sperm live for five days:
unless, finding their lover
in the dark, they survive
for decades. Long enough
to write verse about sperm
and mayflies.
Whimsical, no? this forgotten coupling
like lips in the back seat of
a Honda?
The biology of it all is
messy and not nearly poetic enough
unless you think of it in terms of vessels:
a vessel carrying a vessel carrying
genetic material.
This is why, everyone says, I have your chin:
genetics.
Our chins are a secret
that everyone knows about but us.
So,
the romance of mayflies is lost to
mornings in the mirror, like a woman
(supposedly a father delivers you from such things)
(a father makes a man out of you)
and in the light I think about our chins
and vessels carrying vessels.
This vessel of your genetic code writes verse
and callouses its feet on desert gravel.
We hold one another as secrets
everyone knows about but us.
It is a nothing with a world singing on around it and
sometimes in that morning chin-gazing light
that world is gone
and I carry you.
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