It’s a fun poem to read and reread: you’ve done a great job with the sounds, letting those Ls linger in the first stanza and allowing those very suggestive “sh” sounds in the third stanza to speak. What exactly does the speaker of the poem want us to shush about?

There seems to be a hidden contention. Is the comfort we take lazing around in bed the same thing as sensuality? A first consideration of the problem yields an emphatic “no.” Last I checked, it’s a lot of work to go to the club or bar, chat, drink and dance, and hopefully get digits. Nowadays people pay thousands for weekend courses in order to improve their “game” or whatever the kids call it. But your poem’s speaker builds the contention slowly. “Late and lazy” implies strongly there is no “morning” for us if we are at work right away. “Love that” doesn’t just flow into the cat’s behavior of the second stanza, but leaves whatever “morning” is open. The cat curls; the circular motion takes us away from linear orderings (“up bottom”) and thus away from time. This has to be sensual bliss; the sun isn’t a neutral observer but actively washing, suggesting prelapsarian innocence. The poem does a terrific job of hiding that, and we have to wonder whether the pride we take in getting digits is another sort of game. Truly erotic desires may lack the ambition of a chase. Maybe what marks most desires is that they can actually be fulfilled.

The sun introduces time to the poem (“noon,” “June,” “Summers”) and the speaker is attentive to the progression. Time is literally looming larger for speaker, audience, and anyone spoken about –those returning to work. If you want to amend this poem, I’d probably enlarge its scope a bit: how are the naysayers perplexed? The sun merely scorches them, and they retreat into air conditioning. “Again” suggests they have the circular motion of the cat, and that brings forth another consideration. The speaker moves seamlessly from “late and lazy” to “dreams.” Even though I’ve talked above about how erotic longings could be ambitionless, this is not a point without some controversy. My own reading of Xenophon makes this emphatic–can the tyrant be defined as one whose erotic longings are so great he must rule no matter what? “Dreams” take us away from lazing around and may even take us away from sensual bliss. This is perhaps a point connected with my reading of poetry generally. I’m not sold on omniscient narrators. I’d rather hear a voice that articulates something and in articulation runs up against a limit. Usually that happens ironically without the speaker’s knowledge, eg, Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” One could say, though, the speaker hid the contention because thinking through it would deny the “laziness” so romantically described. So I don’t know. I just know I enjoyed reading the poem.

Ashok Karra blogs at http://www.ashokkarra.com. He studies political science and enjoys poetry, two interests that have more in common than people think. You can read about what he’s trying to achieve in this interview. A sample of how poetry and political science might converge can be seen in Lincoln’s rhetoric, which requires careful attention to words to unpack: Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation of Thanksgiving.”