Still-life with Lilith and a night-blooming
sea rose. You are hard and I’m soft with song,
with all the love born long ago from your
song. I’ve found that loving bitter sick-sweat
from any other out of the question.
What can make certain songs flame into life?
and other songs will simply drown out? Dark
One in the vast depths, I know your name but
will not speak it. I have swam with shark gods
and felt no fear. Maximus of Tyre wrote
that Sappho was “small and dark,” but Plato
called her beautiful. I’ve gone to the cliff
where she threw herself into the churning
undertow, saw how you came to claim her.
I dream of you, cameltoe and all. Blue,
blue is the sea. Red, red is your last kiss.
Green, green your first spliff and sip of vodka.
Shark-soul, spirit-lover. I love soft boys
and stone-hard women: the queen and the butch.
I love the sea rose blooming in your hair.
memories of my ghost sista 
Great work, again. I seem only to be able to repeat myself when commenting on your work. I used “Woman Hating” by Andrea Dworkin in an article I wrote a lifetime ago about the demonozation of women, and I remember Lilith as one of the names she used as goddess bitches. Wasn’t Litlith a biblical figure, a temptress assigned the label of a sexual witch or something? You’ve run up against my ignorance again.
Later…
Oh, the nihilism of Andrea Dworkin! I try not to speak ill of the dead … most of the time. I met her when she was invited to speak at our school’s Take Back The Night rally way back in the early 1990s. What I recall of her was that she had a permanent runny nose, demanded her speaking-fee up front then spoke for something like 10 minutes out of the agreed upon 30. It wasn’t her baiting “any act of penetration is an act of rape” that bothered me, it was when she and Catherine McKinnon attempted to create draconian legislation as a possible approach to combating “pornography” (that vague term which meant anything and everything under the sun that could possibly offend). When the only people using your laws are the Far Christian Right to stifle free speech, perhaps you need to reconsider what you are doing. I won’t say the world is a better place without her (that would be petty of me) but I will say that when I look back at the Feminist movement of the 1980s and 90s and how it seemed to self-implode due to the so-called Sex Wars I must and will lay a large portion of the blame on Dworkin and McKinnon and their followers, who helped silence more women than anything Phyllis Schlafly could ever dream of.
Creepy woman, or sure. I left her book on a bus seat in Akron…hopefully one of the bus cleaners found it and deposited it in a proper receptacle.
Later…
wow, i can just imagine some sot of comedy skit in which a lost soul wanders through the hellish landscape that is akron, still holding out hope of redemption, until the bus pulls up and left on ripped seat with its stuffing pooling out is dworkin’s book. at that point one must just embrace the horror that is ohio and realize we are all damned no matter where we go (heh).
The Rubber City…for a day or a lifetime. I was a guest in an Idaho jail for three months, and the library was a battered box with books probably rejected by the local library…and many of them had had their spines broken, so only half the book remained. Just kind of popped into my head when imagining some homeless person coming across Woman Hating on a bus seat and considering it a welcome beginning to their personal library. Aaaaooooooohhhhhh.
Later…
proof that reality is always far more bizarre than fiction. i once knew a bookstore owner in moscow, idaho, but no one who has spent time in its jails. if you don’t me asking, what was it like?
About 100 F, bugs crawling through the cells, one night some guy didn’t want to come in, so he had his cousin or brother-in-law take his shift. B-I-L didn’t even know how to open the cell doors…luckily no fires or emergencies. And, if you like cube steak, hominy, canned cooked vegetables and instant mashed potatoes, you could get fat. The first jail, in Mountain Home…someone had lost the keys to the cells, so all they could do was shackle me to a bench in the office while they carried on with daily business. Barney Fife would have been an upgrade of personnel…real slack-jawed hicks. Life’s a trip.
Later…
losing the keys, yes, i could see how that might make doing one’s job a little hard. it’s amazing how babylon always seems one prat fall from collapsing in on itself. i recall reading an article after 9/11 on some of the problems the FBI were having in trying to do their job. the one that stuck out in my memory was that due to budget cuts agents in the field had to go to public libraries to use computers since the agency couldn’t afford them.
and speaking of things i miss, i was just curious how you are doing? i keep checking your blog for the next installment, hope all is well!