Where Love Is
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
Men’s love is in their arteries and arms.
It pulses through their bodies to the skin
Of those men touch. Men’s love imposes harms
Inside them, finding there its only twin,
Its one identical victim, collapse.
It searches out the giving avenues.
It makes those secret military maps
To make the opposition forces lose.
Men’s love is in pushed pumping, in their parts
That swell and harden, in their bulging veins,
Inside their blood-thick members like their hearts.
The essence of their loving is its stains.
Tattoos are chosen near men’s sweat and hair
And take the form of silent, empty prayer.
~ Phillip Whidden