Category Archives: Poetry

the tempest’s scar: lecherousness

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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I.
Just the merest flutter of temptation
would make a courtesan or a scholar
or a saint wanton, shameless. Lord Byron
knew this. In his Manfred the dead sister
is a symbol of impossible lust.

II.
The mist on the mountain and on the moon
hint at pathways few dare to take. Disgust
is just regret turned in on itself. Soon
the fog of lustfulness, the tempest’s scar,
the night’s charioteer, will come for you.

III.
If you love me, give in, though I am far
away, give in to what we both would do.
You, who are neither nun nor sorceress,
be my sister, my taboo, my lewdness.

as a child the one ghost

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Do not believe this tale until the school
bell rings. They said that I played with myself
in a corner of the yard. Boys were cruel
and girls flew away. Even the blind elf,
always drunk, smelling like a tanned horse hide,
was deaf to me. As a child the one ghost
who stayed was a motherly suicide
with a taste for innocence. Who would boast
that it was virgin cum which kept her in
limbo. But she lied. There is no limbo;
only us. I was her pretty plaything.
She would suckle on me, suck my foreskin
down her throat. And just before my deathblow
orgasm in the yard … the bell would ring.

glory hole

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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You are nude under your clothes. Your perfume
gives you away. Sounds of strangers pissing
brings you to your knees in, please, a mensroom;
one you crept in when no one was looking.
“Do it! Do it!” comes a voice, one, you note,
filled with “baby!” how much you are wanted,
as his alien darkness fills your throat.
Some love their trysts and treachery, lifeblood
that sings. Some don’t. There’s the urban legend
about some bloke who lost more than his soul
and his pride when he had his cock bitten
clean off one Thursday at the glory hole.
Do not believe such tales. The earth-weary
tell these tales. We’re not weary, we’re horny.

after the chemo we return to our village

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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Balumba stole my lover’s breath. She died
and all of Mayumba suffered with me.
The next day, down by the ocean, I spied
the ghost of my love as she passed. Fairy
lights were in her hair, her left breast had grown
back and her splendid ass shook as she walked.
Balumba had painted an ash skull-bone
on my lover’s face and prated and squawked
in the mist of my dead Osa’s unbound
hair. I do not like blue-faced Balumba,
even if she is a woman who drowned
under the long shadows of the casbah.
Osa just smiles. Death was not the nightmare
she thought. Neither was our secret affair.

    Notes

Bongolo Hospital of Libreville is the only cancer treatment center in all of Gabon, Africa. The distance from Libreville to my coastal village of Mayumba is 276 miles. Mayumba is known for its long sandy beach where leatherback turtles nest.

Balumba (whose name means Ghost Face) is a Gabonese haunt from the same region.

the abyss

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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spirit shark of my soul

spirit shark of my soul

1.
Mountains do not amaze the way the gaps
in the earth do. The Marianas calls
for me, those dark bottomless shapes on maps
where our feeble sunlight dies and nightfalls
over and over into the abyss.

2.
To sink, to drift, to dream, a soul crying
in the darkness. I do not know if “bliss”
is the right word, perhaps it’s “fear”? Drowning
is a thing larger than our souls. Union

3.
with these eldritch horrors. Souls can never
find their way home once lost in the ocean.

4.
Pray for this diving bell and its diver.
Pray that pressure does not crush, oxygen
holds out, that all we love comes back again.

amazonomachy

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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Now I hunt for the tomb of Queen Myrine,
was with her when the walls of Cerneh fell.
Myrine, who laid the Greek and Philistine
worlds to ash. Hippolyta, the rebel
Amazon, loved her. And, fey and childlike,
I did, too. Wars come, wars go, but hunger
remains. Once, curious what I tasted like
inside, we fell, clinging to each other
in a berserk haze. Hips grinding, amazed,
hot with blood-sweat until the war-god, Mars,
became enraptured. Now women are praised
for their chastity, not battle scars.
My queen, your tomb is lost, but your cravings
and name live on. Take these, my offerings.

    Note:

Amazonomachy: art portraying battles between Greeks and Amazonian warriors; Pheidias designed an amazonomachy upon the shield of Athena Parthenos, a statue of the goddess found in the Parthenon.

a scandalous love affair with colors

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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What can I say? Gray does not breathe and blue
is too smug, green a cheat. Then there’s yellow.
I can live with yellow, whose one virtue
is a warm, gentle buzzing, all mellow
and soft, in my ears whenever we kiss.
One time I got to third base with purple,
that’s not saying much, I know. The princess
of the spectrum, teal, calls me a wastrel-
-nogoodnik-bum. All that is luminous
delights me. All that is so bright it burns
my eyes, pleases. There is a queer blindness
though, when it comes to night hues and nocturnes,
blindness the way the soul is blind at peace
and all my needs to be loved by things cease.

translating wormwood

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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All the ancient birds heard me say farewell
to the trees, my deep roots, when my shadow
was touched by that egg of dark, that thin shell.
I am now far from the sea, the ghetto,
even the horizon does not recall
my name. I seem to miss those ugly things
that helped anchor me here. I had a doll
once, a lost thing without hair or blessings,
that slept in my arms since no one else would.
We make do with what will love us. Like words,
we love what shows up. Translating wormwood
into poems. I call on all bastards
to show me how to live with this pathos.
Better still, how to master this chaos.

mahdokht: daughter of the moon

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Naked or veiled, you’re not some impotent
man’s wet dream; black kohl of a houri tossed
to a paradise only a merchant
of girl flesh would pander to. When you lost
your milk teeth, you threw them up to the sun,
singing, “take my donkey teeth and bring me
gazelle teeth.” I love how our old heathen
language survived. Now we speak with fairy
tongues. My daughter, you might be a jinneh,
but you’re no reward, no handmaid. Naked
or veiled, I shall love you. I shall love you
chaste and vestal or ribald and risque.
We speak of an agreement, a scared
pact, not spoken in Persian or Hebrew.

][][

Notes:

Houri: in Persian lore, one of the immortal virgins of the Koranic paradise; used to describe a beautiful, but submissive, woman.

Jinneh: a female jinn.

phantasmic comforts: asleep in the city of souls

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Las Vegas literature has been and continues to be a literature of exiles, written mainly by outsiders who arrived from elsewhere, stayed briefly, lingering along the city’s glittering Strip and never once invest the place with any depth, any soul, any idea of what was going on around them.

Las Vegas literature has been and continues to be a literature of exiles, written mainly by outsiders who arrive from elsewhere, stay briefly, linger along the city’s glittering Strip but never once invest the place with any depth, any soul, any idea of what is going on around them.

I had never witnessed so many ghosts
until I lived in Vegas. The desert’s
potter’s field; for, what other city boasts
such a thin veil? What phantasmic comforts
could such a necropolis offer up
to the living? The Valley of Fire called
and the temple of Sekhmet called. Worship
comes in all forms. Can you hear this? Ribald
pleasures are nothing compared to carnal
worship. The ghosts came in throngs. They hungered
to be witnessed. “Hear me, friend, the frightful
veil is not all so frightful,” they murmured.
There is no Emerald City; Vegas
is a way station, nothing more or less.