The Delicious Hell of a New Jersey Sex Dungeon

Dark Horse Portal

for Deb

Portal is a video game
where you wield a gun that shoots 
holes. One you go into, one you come
out of, each end delicately placed on the wall,
facing one another in Escherian drama.
In this portal, Mommy is a robot,
and the robot puts you through hell. But let's
not talk tech. In life, disparate points
may also be connected. See: leading group fitness
classes back when my body could
hold my bottomless desire for pain; and ten
years later, seated on the floor of a “dungeon”
in a nondescript New Jersey Holiday Inn,
wrapped in the arms of the woman who’s
just lavished bruises upon my ass and thighs.
But Nat, you're burying the lede.
This poem is really about “Dark Horse,” Katy
Perry’s 2013 “witchy and dark” pop hit, the video
where she, uh . . . pretends to be Egyptian?
Yeah, that song. The one to which I pushed eager
bodies into cardio panic long ago.
It was an up-tempo remix, to be clear on this.
When I taught that track, I thought I would die. 
Not dying was my fantasy of resistance: in
discipline, I'd avoid coming to harm.
And yet—long since harmed—it’s 2025 and I hear 
“Dark Horse” in the dungeon, where someone's getting 
fucked near a portable speaker. It's the 
slower radio version, but the song is the same: 
near-blackout gasping, ankles shot, shorts damp 
with piss from tuck jumps, alive in the hell
I once gave myself. And now I’m living in delicious
hell gifted to me by someone else. 
This is not a game: I want
you to hurt me. Tell me I'm good, yes, 
a good little boy—no robot. Let me be abased by
longing. And when “Dark Horse” plays again, take me
back through the hole. Be the one 
who makes me feel it.

The Ninety-Two Dollar Snail

for Brigitte

Standing in a gift shop you tell me the cost
of the snail in U.S. dollars instead 
of Canadian, arguing it’s less than initially supposed.
The purchase may be worth it—and yet
this all feels like too much
desire. When I say that, what do you see?
Maybe the Nova Scotian 
cafe we dined in days before, where I did agree 
to buy a grab bag of “treasure” and unpack 
its broken contents. The reveal: a chipped mug 
holding rainwater bracing 
as the maritime air 
I thought at first too cold
too cold to feel is how I’ve felt for so long, after all
I thought I’d forever be an icy geometry 
who releases light refracted ’til it hides its hungry
source in clever ways.
Yet on this northern soil, studied designs
demand we cut up the rules of previous prototypes,
collage out something else: sunrise over
Prince Edward Island, puddles following
a brief storm. And muses:
one who wears the perfect feather earrings. Another 
bearing throttled passion whose tunes I recognize. 
If I had to describe it, I’d say my life’s been
a solo journaling game where I struggle to record
hurt before its bittersweet splendor is sacrificed 
on the altar of new distractions—
in this case, a felted snail who undermines all rationality
by being too sweet, too 
soft, and though I’ve desired 
such transport before, this is the first time you
have stood by my side in view of the object in question
saying yes
there is a cost and I appreciate that it’s high
but also I understand why 
you want this and I think
you can have it. You 
can have it.