Hood
A master leads his slave through the bar, the slighter man bound to his lodestar by a leash hooked to his collar,
every surface of him swathed,
rubber, leather,
hard to tell in this light.
Little slits in
the hood , almost nothing
of him visible.
They look, I think, ridiculous
— but something
compelling about it, too.
That you can see
only the outside, the absurd,
elaborate clothing,
universe of buckles
and straps,
every bit of the body
sealed away,
so nothing of the interior
can be known?
From a distance sex looks,
inevitably, awful:
what’s less graceful
than transport?
Face focussed
to a single point,
clenched, contorted, or the mouth
stretched wide —
Therefore this exterior’s sealed,
blank, so that we might
guess at what lies
beneath: happy abdication,
the will locked down at last,
unable to choose
or to act. Who knows?
&nsbp;Impenetrable,
what’s paraded before us.