Why should my passion be hidden?
I love breasts, something now nearly forbidden
when the disorderly flesh is reduced to a gender.
If I could speak out loud with candor,
I would rhapsodize them jiggly and juggly,
sing their praises, small or large, both lovely
whether in halter top floating or wrapped in spring color,
summer bare in bikini or something even smaller.
I would rebut the reproductive reduction
and taboo on the mutable mammaries’ seduction
of the male gaze – damned as objectification.
Or should it be called deification
since each of us is the wellspring and potential
of the divine, evoking the aesthetic essential
form in the lines and curves of our torsos?
I would chant odes like the bard of Lesbos
who begged the stone Venus for a lover with her lyric,
whether ample Willendorf or modest de Milo, sincere or satiric;
or about Eve’s low-hanging fruit in the garden
or Rosalind blooming in the forest of Arden.
I would reminisce of the scream queens of Hammer,
Ingrid Pitt and Caroline Munro whose bare-breasted glamour
enshrouded women’s hearts full of compassion beating
even for boys still years from their first meeting
with a woman whose breasts they could treasure
and a future where pain is softened by pleasure.

Now here’s a great poem by the late Thomas Lux which fits the prompt as a kind of deathbed confession:

Ode While Awaiting Execution by Thomas Lux

Into the mute and blue-

green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go

though not for that which I’m going.

I deserve to go, and not alone,

because I did not sing loud enough

about this life, this world.

Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not.

There were too many things I saw

of which I did not sing, things raw

and eyeball-vibrating ravishing, or worse, things I forgot,

until a pin-stick shock, a creak

in a house of wood waking to heat,

or a bent nail, remembers for me.

How did Spinoza define happiness?

Patient acceptance of the inevitable?

I find my self im-

patient.

I’m often impatient. Not for the inevitable,

which can wait patiently for me.

So far, the Governor’s not called the Warden,

whose palm has an itch.

He prefers an electrical switch.

My lawyers, having, in law, no degrees,

are not allowed in to counsel me.

Appeals are exhausted, or at least very tired.

So, I scratch this out on my last yellow legal pad’s last

page: I deserve to go,

but not for that which

I’ll lie on a table

and get the needle.