Category Archives: Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow

tía

26 Monday Feb 2024

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“Surrealism is only shocking to those who are shocked by dreams,” André Breton.

Scads of old wounds, tía. Scads. El viento

muere/ en mi herida. “The wind dies/ in

my wound.” And in the blood, tía, its slow

flow, a queer smear. Horror under the skin.

Horror that keeps itching. Alejandra,

tía, I’ll still be your your fag hag that keeps

you from the night that gnaws and, mendiga,

begs in your blood. Infernal stone that weeps.

Sugar crusts. The crunch and chew of language.

An itch. A witch. I cannot stop, auntie,

I call you all: Necromancer of words

and wounds. This scar? Where I pulled my innards

out. Where I washed my old wound in the sea

and used your name as its heinous bandage.

Notes.

If Federico Garcia Lorca would be my uncle, then please let Alejandra Pizarnik be my aunt. These two poets taught me more about the craft than anyone else. And yes, I use the term Craft as in the dark Dionysian powers of the psyche and soul. Pizarnik wrote in fragments, as the language she used drove her insane. Artistically, she is sister to Paul Celan, who wrote in German and committed suicide by drowning in the Seine. Language as virus. Language as plague. The poem of hers I use is, “El viento muere en mi herida./ La noche mendiga mi sangre.”

retch

18 Sunday Feb 2024

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The gods had ceased singing. My verse had cooled,

then dried up. Nightmares, livid with love, came

with puke and drool, as if I’d somehow fooled

Temperance. As if self-restraint and shame

only bedeviled others. And today? ¬

Six years have passed. The bloat has left my face.

¬ Scars on my liver. ¬ Scars on my wordplay. ¬

Lifetime of scars, self-loathing and disgrace;

cuz’ who dies clean? Pffft. Thomas? Poe? Sexton?

Saints of excess. ¬ Today? This day. ¬ Call this

a small price to pay. ¬ Of these fifty-four

years six were spent sober. Without swollen,

flushed flesh. Without the gods, “taking the piss.”

¬ Without retch. ¬ Without fucking up hardcore.

note.

Today, 2/18/2024, marks my 6th year anniversary of entering Recovery. As they say, one day at a time.

gall

21 Sunday Jan 2024

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Tallow in winter. That long-toothed ruin

wrung from drippings. The decay of Eros

dribbling down my wrist. Say it in Latin.

[Demon] [Possession] “Daemonicus.”

Possession. Mine. Flesh rendered so I’m fit

for your gluttony. Yet something fetid

hangs in the frozen air. Frostbit. The bit

that was a nose, two lips, one pale eyelid.

Frostbite leaves the dark pit in my skull

exposed. It takes a certain hungry gall

to snog with just any possessed bastard.

They say if you can’t be a good example

then be a grisly warning. Gouged; I’m all

brittle bone. Now kiss me like a blizzard.

scars

04 Wednesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Armenia, Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow, Poetry, sonnet

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Less than a week. Thirty-five years of war

ended … like that. Already its become

myth. Lands none can return to; one more scar

for the soul. Scars … and the narcissism

that nostalgia brings will be the headstone

on my grave. Holy mountains I’ll never

return to. “Artsakh” comes out like a moan

each time I say its name. You’re dead, lover,

buried near Shusha. “Lick me,” you had said,

one of the things that your husband refused

to do; your tickled pink. Now all Artsakh

has been abandoned along with its dead.

Less than a week. All that forfeited blood

festering. The reek of yearning and shock.

notes.

Shusha is a city in the Southern Caucasus Karabakh mountains (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh). The Republic of Artsakh has, since the fall of the USSR, been fighting for their right of self-determination against their neighbor, Azerbaijan, which sees the entire region as part of its own.

Now [10/4/2023] a week has passed since the ethnic Armenians of Artsakh agreed to a ceasefire, agreeing that by the New Year the Republic will cease to be. It has been estimated that within 48-hours of that declaration more than 100,000 citizens fled Artsakh, leaving behind everything. I’m not Armenian but this loss and the dread of what horrors might entice an entire population to leave has consumed all my days of late, my dreams, my disbelief.

barmy

28 Sunday May 2023

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On the sad, bad days, when I am naked

and gray as heath, I wander dazed throughout

the old orchard, fruit rotting in the mud,

straw and twigs in my hair. On the burnout

days, days without dream, days where tall grass

strokes my glory as I pass, when I gasp

as I give, my cum dotting our morass,

I know I won’t come back as some phat-ass

ghost to amuse, a swine herder’s wet dream.

No. I’ll be your twitchy soul. Forgotten.

Naked in a world that mocks nudity

and calls masturbation a mean blaspheme.

Prophecy has left me sick with passion

without a purpose, unfulfilled, barmy.

thew

27 Saturday May 2023

Posted by in Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow, Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Even on hands and knees No still means No,

so I pull out, bent over your shoulder,

kissing your scarred face. Half of your afro

never grew back from where your ex-lover,

a man you’d called pimp, had thrown the acid.

“Pumped a lot of tane down in New Orleans,”

Tina crooned on the record player. “Flood

me,” you’d say, meaning, “fuck me like we’re teens

again,” awash in cum. I’ve kissed each seam

in your flesh, the stitched space where your eye sat,

all your fused thew. Sometimes I can feel you

unclench around me, convulse, crash and scream.

Gimme safe, love, when, “nice and rough,” falls flat,

and Proud Mary’s, “nice and easy,” won’t do.

][][

Notes:

“Thew,” is an old-fashion term for muscles and tendons. As far as I can gather, “tane” is short for octane, or perhaps gasoline. In Ike and Tina Turner’s version of Proud Mary, Tina explains, “We never ever do nothing/ nice and easy./ We always do it nice and rough,” which is fabulous, unless one’s PTSD gets in the way. We’re all works in progress, I suppose.

roiling

04 Tuesday Apr 2023

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In the old sailor prayers their songs go —-

“9 waves, 9 tides, 9 times the sea has come.”

I’ve known only 3 ocean storms. I know,

I’m told, the gods of the sea are gruesome.

Even now, with the rain falling in sheets,

something vast and deep, full of roiling clouds

with long, tangled strands that lurches and beats

on the deck, howling through the stays and shrouds,

halyards and braces, hungers. I hunger,

too. 3 times this hunger has come. With you,

like the old sea prayers, I would make it 9.

I am full of lascivious anger —-

but you knew that when you kissed me. You knew

this storm would be both grotesque and divine.

this

03 Tuesday May 2022

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Now words are rare. Whatever synapses

let in the Divine are misfiring. ––

Neurons fail. Neural pathways do not please.

Now words are a struggle. I’m struggling

just to write this. Once I said I’d go turn

a tramp steamer into a library. ––

Sail from port to port, sharing that stubborn

love of books with all who live by the sea.

Now I’m struggling just to write this. Now

I sit in my chair and –– stare. There are no

books here. Words, like the water, turn brackish

each time I go down. Let me drown, somehow,

instead of this decline. Instead I know:

first I floundered, now flail and soon perish.

writhingly

26 Friday Nov 2021

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Tangled hair in foam. Desolate skin. Breasts

beaten in waves. Where will my ghost shark go

when my lung start to fill? The sea’s conquests

shall all pass overhead while terrors flow

around. Listen: even darkness can blur

in the deepening depths. Without gravestone

or bones you won’t call me your ancestor.

Child of stars and storms. Child of a sea crone

and her fishwife. Orphan of all the drowned.

What good are husky-wet lips when you won’t

kiss them? Underflow: make me writhingly

grotesque, like the Sea’s fey or Brine’s hellhound.

Once I pressed to enter you. You said, “don’t.”

We stopped. My grave lays here: in memory.

blunder

16 Thursday Apr 2020

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Often I wake up sore and bent. Not riled,
but spent. As if I’ve brawled, bullied in dreams

I can’t recall; the rest of this defiled
life spent in memory. No wonder, “screams,”

and, “dreams,” rhyme so easily. No wonder
I can’t recall. I’ve been on either side

of that word: Bully. Dull One. The Blunder.
Special Ed. I thought … I hoped if I fried

my brain enough I would forget; yet hell
is on either side of that, too. What screams

more than, “sorry, dull child, I couldn’t save
you”? I broke you, child; and since to rebel

is to forget that you’re broken, all my dreams
show me, each time, that I’ve never been brave.