Poppies

I’ve read so many poems about poppies;

Fields of them, red, girls in summer dresses

upturned, somersaulting, cartwheeling, or raped.

I never walked through a field of poppies,

but outside the train’s window from Munich to Vienna

I saw them, thousands of them,

red, girls lifting up their petalled skirts at me

flirting, or saying fuck you, hinting their sexes at the fast moving glass.

O, gentle opiate, I’ve unfastened my silver shoes,

I’ve walked so long and now I’m ready to go to sleep;

Coddle me, dust my eyelids, I can nearly feel the breeze your

fields imply—

I would sleep forever in and under you,

my right hand kept warm by my sex,

the left by my heart;

I'd dream eternity in the dark red iambs my

blood moves cleanly through me, and

each dream will encapsulate a lifetime!

The girls, aloof, maternal, will dust me with nectar,

and show me not their unknowable faces.

I will descend into dispassionate facsimile,

the flush of my cheeks, the moistening of my mouth,

response to my own mysterious stimuli.

Don’t look for me here, for I’ve found you,

don’t raze the fields, lest I wake;

I want to continue as an unknown ratio—

The Comfortable Coward,

the Innocuous Sensate,

the warm-bodied Sleeper, a girl whose

consequence is none.