The Starfish

Sometimes I think the best poems I write are my musings on sex, or poems containing thoughtful inclusion of sex as it relates to everything -- which it does, of course, they way everything relates to everything, and maybe even more so -- but since these writings have so much potential to offend (like everyone's musings on sex, ever), I rarely post them anywhere publicly.
The Starfish is one of these good, but possibly problem-causing musings. I wrote it probably a year-ish ago.

The Starfish

I want to put sex at the center, like a bright red pin

in the middle of a map, somewhere in Africa, right

at the crosshairs of the Equator and the Prime Meridian,

but not like a destination, like an earthquake

with everything else rippling out from there

except the news crew vans screaming toward that singular

point of upheaval.

I want to put sex at the center, like summer

at the white hot apex of a year, how the all seasons

rise to its solstice and burst and fall away. I want all my days

to blossom from its beating heart.

Sex should be the nucleus and axis and pinnacle, the square

cornered foundation, the molten planet’s core, the origin,

Big Bang and flare in the darkness.

And since, when you cut the arms off a starfish,

they keep growing back and keep growing more starfish,

maybe there was only ever one starfish, one

stomach, one eye, one mass of arms with a mouth in its nest,

one first fistful of suction cups that multiplied and multiplied,

spreading, that taught everything else and all of life and us

to cling like hell to each other and the face

of the spinning earth.