"A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare"

Lucian Freud painting via

Climbing Everest  
by Frederick Seidel

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.
But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It's almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

I'm getting young.
I'm totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite
which will turn me into light
God is great! I suck her tongue.

I mean -- my sunbursts, and there are cloudbursts.
My dynamite penis
Is totally into Venus.
My penis in Venus hungers and thirsts.
It bursts and drowns.

My dynamite penis
Is into Venus.
The Atlantic off Sagaponack is freezing black today and frowns.

I enter the jelly fish folds
Of floating fire
the mania in her labia can inspire
Extraordinary phenomena and really does cure colds.

It holds the Tower of Pisa above the freezing black waves.
The mania is why
I mention I am easily old enough to die.
And actually it's the mania that saves

The Tower from falling over.
Climbing Everest is the miracle -- which leaves the descent
And reporting to the world from an oxygen tent
In a soft pasture of cows and lover.

Happening girls parade around my hospice bed.
The tented canopy means I am in the Rue de Seine in Paris.
It will embarrass
Me in Paris to be dead.

It's Polonius embarrassed behind the arras.
And the arras turning read.
Hamlet has outed Polonius and Sir Edmund Hillary will wed
Ophelia in Paris.

Give me Everest or give me death.
Give me altitude with an attitude.
But I am naked and nude.
I am constantly out of breath.

A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,
But right now one is coming through the door
With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.
She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.