Category Archives: sonnet

the first exile

20 Sunday Jan 2013

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“I’m not a good lay/ I’m a straight razor,”
Judy Grahn, “Edward the Dyke”

There was no grief. The summer radio
played “you can have my husband/ but don’t mess
with my woman” all day long. Your afro
gleamed as we cruised in your Austin Princess
downtown. Playtime approached. After playtime
came dawn. Dusk and dawn. But you, drunk on spunk,
the first exile, loved love during wartime,
with your kerosene myth, junk in your trunk
and duck’s arse cut. Girls called you Liliti;
I called you my “mama-jan;” my surreal
strap-on sister. My roots and the orgy
where I was conceived. One hand on the wheel
while your other played with my head between
your thighs, licking your clit stiff and obscene.

cocksure with what you are holding

20 Sunday Jan 2013

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I can sense your scent in the wind’s distress,
in tastes that ravish — the grape and anise
that grow on your grave. I wear the headdress
of my mistress. I carry her chalice
and her stone knife. In the mist of slumming
flowers and wet earth you have hung over
my bed, a silent silver thing, shining
through tree branches. I have pulled you closer,
sucked long at your foggy breast, played with your
wet and hazy clit. If sadness can haunt,
so can need, so can greed. You are cocksure
with what you are holding. With what you want.
joining What-was-not with What-might-have-been,
joining your dead lust with my living sin.

pink egg cracks

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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If I had the voice I’d sing the mystic’s
lullaby, salt hallow, to keep you safe.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
my voice a lisping hell, must love my waif
sister, family ghost, in a new way.
Your eyes are beautiful beggars, now beg
for fry bread and a butterscotch sundae.
I’ll feed you. Between your legs your pink egg
cracks. I’ll break it for you. Like a firefly
you sleep three feet off the floor. I’ll guard you.
When you cry I’ll kiss your shaggy bangs dry.
And in rutting season I’ll make you mew,
then goo on me. A song for a sinner.
A lullaby for my dead kid sister.

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

Posted by in Illustration and art, Poetry, sonnet

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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

Posted by in Erotic, Feminism, Poetry, sonnet

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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.