Well Bottom Blues

   I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

— Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

#36 from Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit

I am all men. I’m torn between
the delicate pleasure of soft company
and my second adolescence’s burning need
for soft skin, eyes turned vertical after
and a different sort of conversation.
There may be an age of temperance
but I’m not ready for that monastery.
Wrong to seek completion? Is this sin?

Guilt to make first grade’s Sister Timothy
proud, but what good am I to my Queen
if my heart explodes, bipolar detonates.
My heart is furiously cyclonic, howling.
My levees overtopped by floods of desire.
I cannot find the dangerous radius of love.