[Matt Q]

Hi James,

Like Cameron, I remember an earlier version of this. I like the revisions and the cuts. The poem seems tighter now and pretty much done. And I still really like the close. The quiet, gentleness of it against the rough clamour of what precedes.

FWIW, the opening, which for some reason confused me back then now seems very clear. The nightclub has some policy, official or otherwise, around physical appearance, which one or both of the "we" here, don't meet. Maybe they're deemed overweight, say. And the spiel overcomes that.

I only have a couple of things.

I wonder if you need to state that "one man is fellating another", since you go on to describe it. Maybe it's better if the reader is allowed to deduce it from, "one man is [...]
knelt as if in prayer, the receiver's eyes wide ..." -- or a slightly tweaked (twunk?) version of that -- without having been told in advance what the image shows?

I don't really understand this image: "An ecstatic cherry has been disemboweled to create / the red-lit chill-out zone" so I can't picture it. A literal cherry? Or is cherry implying something. A virgin maybe? Whatever the image, though, you're an 'l' short of "disembowelled".

Good to see this again in its latest incarnation.

best,

Matt