The Russian Bath House, a poem.

Circles of Dante`s Hell.

Ancient colossus seated.

Berber chiefly towelled.

Tepidarium stone benches.

Insidiously steam filled.

Quiet naked men.

Russian bull necks.

Ponderous shoulders, torsos.

Delta of stomachs and thighs.

Owners squatting and lumbering.

Neuter looking flesh.

Plastic sandals.

Heating body blowing.

Chest heaving.

Lungs wheezing.

Underfoot tiles scalding.

Furnace boiler booming.

Men slumped in stupor.

Unbreathable air inferno..

Black and suffocating embrace.

Bowed blobs of incandescent flesh.

Phantasmal array of bath mats..

Acolytes religiously scrubbing.

Victorian schoolboy like whipping.

Trashing shoulders and legs.

Birch twigs flailing.

Air filled whirring and thwacking.

Skin luxuriously tingling.

Fragrant rash birch bark.

Sybaritic grunts and burps.

Pores Opened.

Flesh painlessly chastened.

Mind’s pleasurable sense of atonement;