Healthy Hedonism; and, Holy Hedonism, Paired Sonnets
Healthy Hedonism
Tattoo upon yourself this perfect law—
The sacredness of pleasure is above
The other, puny principles. The awe
That it deserves, like God in love,
Confirms that thrills, inviolate and white
Hot holiness, are ordered by the halls
With marble beds in rows ordained by height
And breadth of thinking. Philosophy calls
Out with cocaine high-powerd free demand,
“Indulge yourself to rise up to the life
Of virtue driven by your ache’s command.
All other laws will cause internal strife.”
..The intellect, when honest, has no time
….For rules that say pure pleasure is a crime.
Holy Hedonism
“Sometimes our desires are deeper even than our prayers. That is one of the many ways in which the Devil mocks us.”~ Simon Taylor, Mortimer’s Deep, 291
The Devil mocks us in our deepest leaps.
He mocks us in profundity of hearts
That sink in bathyspheres to find the deeps
We plunge to, sinking with our secret parts
In bolted pleasure. Bolts go into holes
And we are bound like battleships, their hides,
Their metal hides. We do not think of souls.
We do not think of weddings, grooms and brides.
We think of depths like Mariana Trench
Or troubled seas of densest, densest gas
On Saturn, thinking of sex sin, its stench
In Aphrodite’s nostrils. It has mass,
Wild mass that Allah loathes. We take the leap.
Our prayers are shallow. Sinking skin is deep.