“This Erotic Burn” by John G. Evans

I am fire fanning the flames of crucified flesh unduly forsaken,

I am the hot, red, hallowed blood that burns through guiltless veins.

                  I am the sacred night sweltering for sacred curves and cambered frames. *

With fiery dreams and melded hearts, flowered echoes in the blackness of night,

woven within the fabric for each soul’s birthright.

I am a fiery star of a universal midnight.

For each rhythmic flow of written words, the page spills over at the brim,

the rawness of word carries true till life’s very end.

I am the poet nude in thought, her voice and charms as coal burns hot.

I have burned, and yearned to burn, for a simple taste of love unearned.

I have surrendered my soul who thirsts the burn that never dies.

It is in death I cry, or a sacred moment I lie, in this cradle of vexing flesh.

In touching the sun for a mystical heart, oh, burning soul

and brackish flesh, why, oh why?

This erotic burn and erogenous mess?

Well, “abstinence is better than perfect moderation” *

spoken by a true religious.

And others, eunuchs, saints, blest,

a harvest tool to set us free of modernity.

*cambered frames meaning undulated bodies.

*Saint Augustine (quote).

This poem This Erotic Burn shares a rare, yet raw details from April 1972 while serving active duty with the USMC. This moment sieged by an aggravated assault through a forceful violation of my sexual intimacy. This siege occurred before I knew the love of a good woman. This incident also proved to shape my underdeveloped mind at seventeen regarding my sexual intimacy I will carry with me the remainder of my life. I did fight back, although, facing sluggish year upon sluggish year of a numbing Military Sexual Trauma (MST), that deadened me throughout my teens and twenties with a suicidal ideation.