Matthew Lippman

SOMETHING COULD COME OF IT CALLED EVERYTHING

What does it mean to be fucked in a good way? 
Does it mean both people are just going at it 
and the going at it is all butterflies and battlefield,
jackhammers or soup
dahlias and race car driving and sticking your toe in the bathwater? 
Someone will probably read this and think I am a misogynist or a nationalist or an agist.
Who gives a fuck?
The point is, what does it mean to get fucked in a way that feels good 
and there is no mind involved, 
no mind left 
in the fucking? 
That means that you disappear.
I want that. 
I have never had this.
It’s like what Isaac Luria said about the creation of everything--
that God had to disappear inside of God-ness 
to make nothing 
so something could come of it called Everything. 
Is that what a good fuck is? 
Arriving into everything that is art, books, Ballantine ale, borscht, 
and poems and piñatas and Pokémon and moons—you do the math.
It’s just two bodies at the molecular level taking care of some kind of primal business 
to feel something primal. 
I must say, I wish my whole life was a good getting fucked.
I’m talking about drinking tea, making corn, driving to work, playing darts, picking lint, 
saying hello--
the whole thing, 
every little thing. 
And that I could do it naked, 
be naked even when my three-piece suit, all velour and Versace, 
was covering my beautiful frame. 
I wish we could all be fucked in a good way, every day and in every moment.
Maybe then there wouldn’t be any bad shit around the corner 
where the darkness is, 
all those lurking psychopaths in the front office, 
in the oval office, 
in the media office
in the office of ruins and despair, 
kicking humanity in the head like, what, 
it was meant to be tenderness or something?

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest book Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024.