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Sleeping with Howard Roark, new poem by Todd Swift

Sleeping With Howard Roark

Only so often before that long chisel
in his thigh became more obstacle
than fertile marker; only so many times
I could spread as wide as a compass
to be ruled by the international style.
Roark never smiled during sex.
He'd just throw me right down
onto the appropriate organic materials
for the occasion, and I'd fit into the form
he most desired. I'd unfold, his blueprint.

Once I'd seen him dive into that quarry,
when just a girl without shape. An orphan,
I knew only molten ore. I craved pistons
and city walls erecting a new future,
and his arc that day down into clarity
struck me as it did that sheet surface
as a sign that though there was no God
there was a good in any body whose will
threw them from a height to tame water,
so that they would break it rising for air.

A body to hammer out design, to make
things to thrust high above the masses;
as when he'd say all his cooling love
was in the stress point where we both came,
penetration a golden mean; lust, curvilinear
abstraction. An unbroken I-beam, he'd turn
me to masculine function, engines rolling
across an open horizon of iron and chrome.
A fist would take my hair to cut his mouth on,
my sharp free and unrepentant home of stone.



new poem by Todd Swift

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