Category Archives: Poetry

the things that still haunt me

16 Saturday Feb 2013

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for Nadia Anjuman, ‘Asma’ bint Marwan, Pat Lowther, Delmira Agustini, Ayat al-Ghermezi, Ayman Udas, Susana Chavez, Isabella Morra and all other poets and writers murdered by their husbands, their communities, their family and kin.

Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
— Jane Hirshfield, “The Poet”

We sit out in the dirt before the gates
of the kingdom of drudgery. We want

to get in. Believe me, there are worse fates
than soul-crushing work. The things that still haunt
me starved me. Now my body is wasted.

At least my body is still mine. Secrets
only bring me grief, like my arms, scalded
from the splattering cooking oil. Prophets
remind us of death and rebirth, as if.

Go read Nadia Anjuman’s poem,
“I wail.” Wail: she was killed for that. Dreaming

still kills; still grinds us down over a whiff
from where our poets hang. How to condemn
this? I want poetry that does something.

unfit

16 Saturday Feb 2013

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They say that the cruel one must now depart
at dawn. Come back to bed, love. I’ve been cruel
but not like that. I am shallow. My heart
knows that it will be judged by the jackal
headed god Anubis one day. “Unfit;”
I am sure that will be what I am told.
“Unfit” gets you consumed by vile Ammit,
the soul-eater. Tomorrow I’ll be cold
as a crypt. Tonight, though, I burn. Stay here.
They say you can’t get to heaven depraved.
What’s a bruise? a bite? I’ll mark your flesh mine.
And then what comes between us I will smear
across your face. I don’t care to be saved.
Damnation is also an act divine.

* * *

Note:

Anibus is the jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion.

Ammit is a funerary deity, a female demon in ancient Egypt; part lion, part hippopotamus and part crocodile. Her titles included, “Devourer of the Dead,” “Eater of Hearts” and “Great of Death.” Her job was eating souls judged by Anibus as corrupt.

all for naught

16 Saturday Feb 2013

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It’s not the need that I find bewitching,
anyone can be a junkie. It’s when
the need no longer works. Upon rising,
finding that one needs to feed yet again.
Finding that the need has not abated.
That the old shit just doesn’t work today.
That is panic. Everything you snorted,
consumed, and (the Devil will have her say)
infested, but all for naught. That is work.
That is irony. Of course the fallen
appear pleasing when we tell our story,
we are clueless. We’ve don’t know that berserk
rage when it fails. Talk about damnation:
stuck at romanticizing the junkie.

a long moan of a word

15 Friday Feb 2013

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"erica jong, 1971" collage work (2013)

“erica jong, 1971” collage work (2013)

I.
Dear Erica. You said, “woman’s a long
moan of a word with a man in it.” Damn.
Girl, I pronounce girl, “vrouw die.” That strong
Dutch word that ends in murder. Like a gram
of coke, it is how we use it that counts.

II.
Like fire storm whirlwinds. Like The Madonna
of Blood, who serves up slaughter by the ounce.
We’re all guilty of myth-making. Mama

III.
Poet, your daughters wander this dream world.
I’ve seen them (not once with a man inside).
Dreaming is all I’m good at. Demeter
went to hell for her daughter, found her curled
in the pit. I want to wake up. I’ve tried.
I’ve tried. Anything for my big sister.

* * *

Notes:

* Erica Jong is an American author, known for her works, Fear of Flying, Shylock’s Daughter and Seducing the Demon. We all must give praise to our literary matriarchs, as it were. Without her book Fruits & Vegetables paving the way I would not be writing what I write today. It is as simple as that.

* According to Google translate, the word “girl” can be rendered “vrouw die.” So they say.

that’s enough for me

15 Friday Feb 2013

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putney in wintertime.

putney in wintertime.

London and a diet of shrimp curry,
Southern Comfort, hashish; I can recall
my poor hip pressed up against your icy

wall. We spooned all “winta.” Your Gravesend drawl
made me giggle. We loved Aladdin Sane.

I won’t list faults. Complaining kinda blows.

Why should I complain about love? Complain
it did not work? As if no beasts, heroes,
singers or thinkers ever once fucked up.

We don’t talk about redheaded witchcraft
or She Who Cannot Be Named. Talk is cheap.

Betrayal poems cheaper. I’m grown up.
You’re dead … so what? Once you told me you laughed
with joy as I lay in your arms, asleep.

thirsty beasts

15 Friday Feb 2013

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thirsty beasts

They were at Mina’s door, with “cocu geste,”
deceived fury; they found the Count, smiling,
sitting on her bed, dazed, tousled, bare chest
pressed to her lips. She, carnivore, drinking,
took her fill. The world is full of unknown,
thirsty beasts; Victorian men were blind
to their own. Ask the maid, mother and crone.
Ask those who love and have been loved. Mankind
with its syphilis and brothels ruins it
for the rest of us. Mina soon declared
she was “unclean” and vowed never to “kiss”
another man. The virus we transmit
might damn us. Yet, as with all blood, love shared
between us, brings such ambrosian bliss.

war’s cure

14 Thursday Feb 2013

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Dada'ab 1

How to understand? In dreams I’m simply
holding a child together in my arms,
swathed and bloody. Wake up. In Swahili

mzimu means ghost. They come from burnt farms,
poisoned wells, fields where the bodies went down.

Who understands the dead?: ghosts, mzimu,
souls. Go work at Kenya’s Dada’ab Town,

largest refugee camp in the world. “You
need to work,” we tell ourselves. Understand

words are a start but not an end. Orphans
and ghosts are still looking for us. War’s cure
is hard work; so find us a new grassland,
enough for all. Enough food for millions.
Enough water to let us dream once more.

largest refugee camp in the world

largest refugee camp in the world

Kenya-Dada'ab

grotesque

14 Thursday Feb 2013

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We talk about death and war abstractly.
and pray that it happens elsewhere. I pray
for the dead. She came and spoke Swahili,
died with baby fat, mouth parched, her blue-gray
skin cracked like a shell. At the age of ten
she fought with the LRA. She doesn’t
speak of how she died. “At the hands of men,”
I thought. “Grotesquely.” She stood, shy, silent,
waiting to be remembered. When she crawled
in my lap I gathered her up. “Daughter
of love, you are safe here.” A madman’s war
consumed her, grotesquely. I was appalled
by her wounds. But Wesesa, girl soldier,
doesn’t care; she’s not alone anymore.

][][

Notes:

The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) is a militant cult movement operating in Uganda, Sudan, the DRC. It has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, sex slavery and recruiting and forcing children to participate as solders in active combat. It is run by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet, who claims the LRA is engaged in a holy war with the aim of establishing an Uganda theocracy based on the Ten Commandments and local tribal laws.

deathblow

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

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"For the man who should loose me is dead, fighting with the Duke in Flanders, in a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?" -- Amy Lowell

“For the man who should loose me is dead, fighting with the Duke in Flanders, in a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?” — Amy Lowell

* * *

“i too am a rare
pattern. as i wander down
the garden paths …”
— Amy Loewell, Patterns

And you answered, “it shall be as you said.”

And I’m dead and you think of my deathblow

as you walk up and down with brushed forehead
on our garden path, giving way to snow,
in your stiff gown, gorgeously arrayed, boned
and stayed. But not as Amy Lowell wrote down.

You’re no lady and I no colonel, stoned
on cheap morphine, in a French trench. I drowned,

not in Flanders, but at sea. You’ll grow old
walking our path; but I will be nineteen
evermore. If it had been death at war
and not a mistake, would that have consoled
you? As if a bullet wound and gangrene

would make such a difference for evermore.

you oughta know by now—

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

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federico garcia lorca, mi amor

federico garcia lorca, mi amor

* * *

“If your girl likes rhythm and blues, look out
’cause cake’s in the house…”
— Sir Mix-a-lot, Cake Boy

“If you love her” and “then you must send her
somewhere” and “where she’s never been before.”

Do not mock “words of love, soft and tender.”

All my “worn out phrases” come straight from war.
Lovers still die. I’m “a buttercup boy
from the funny school.” By definition
I’ve been to places a 60s tomboy

hasn’t, as all children can claim. Semen
running down our chins. Still, I’ll make you glow,
mamas and papas, take you down tonight.

To where they shot Lorca. Because you mocked
everything “soft and tender.” Federico,
mi amor, I’ll burn them down with delight.
It will leave their souls horror-struck and shocked.

* * *

Note:

* The Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was assassinated in 1936 by General Franco’s fascists for being a liberal and a queer.

* The 1960s group The Mamas and the Papas sang the song Words of Love, which I quote from in the poem. Regardless of what I say elsewhere, bless you, Mama Cass (though Papa John can bite me, jerk)

* I’ve been living with Sir Mix-a-lot’s fake ode (he of the Baby Got Back fame) to the effeminate in men, Cake Boy, for many a year now. It is equally fascinating and frustrating, much like society’s take on the fey. It might not be the very first attempt in mainstream media to talk about gay and transgendered African Americans (see: Honey Honey Miss Thang for a longer discussion) but it was one of the first I came across in hip hop. I am not African American, but I certainly identified with the cake boy motif he describes. I call this a fake ode because at the end of the song Mix-a-lot advocates physical violence against any effeminate man who might be coming on strong to a homeboy’s girlfriend. Homophobia and gay-bashing will always be crimes to send you to the 7th circle of hell in my book.