lavash

27 Wednesday Dec 2023

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There’s dough in my hair, flour on my fingers.

Lick them clean. These fingers. I’m leaving.

Kiss me clean. Obscene what this finger stirs

in you. All day long you’ve seen me making

flat bread. Lavash. Song of cracked wheat. Fable

of dough rolled flat, slapped against the Tonir’s

brick wall. The dead’s flat food and what the skull

won’t eat I will. Breathe in all these odors.

Simple smells at night fall imbued with grief.

When you make bread, you make me; when you roll

dough flat you touch me. I’m leaving; come clean

me one last time. My lips, my flesh, this brief

hint at soul. I’ll be ghostly so soon. Soul,

love me like this: obscene, obscene, obscene.

notes:

Lavash is a popular flat bread in Armenia. Tonir is a stone oven used to cook the bread, similar to an Indian Tandoor.

demotic

12 Tuesday Dec 2023

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& I yanked your hair until you whimpered

& moaned. I call this, too, a sacred act.

This queer cheer. Odd? Odd that the only pact

between us was no pact at all. Squandered

without ache, spurt or need. Without my root

in your root cellar; stretch marks, scabs, stubborn

scars. Proof that the euphoric brute in Brute

Love is still love. Worship all that return

to yearn for a blinding flash. Milky spurts.

Spasms. Second comings. “Cum unto me.”

I did. Past tense squander. I am a thing

of dusk; a thing that divides & perverts

both day & night. Even murk is holy.

All this demotic. All this queer hexing.

bop

29 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Meet me near the mine shaft. We’ll put “anal”

back in “Bacchanal.” You know my wet-wired

flesh, fat stall-fed steak, the hole in my skull

that lets the gods in. All that you’ve desired

is here; two palm’s worth, plucked from the motley

pelt of some goat; unkempt, tangle-haired, lop

-legged, chewing on the bark of yon gnarly,

oaken bough. I’m the “bop” in your “She Bop.”

The thrill you seek every Sunday in church.

Gods are a dime a dozen. But this thrill?

This kiss? This holy rude exchange? It’s this

that you want. Dreams to make you gasp and lurch

out of bed, goat dreams, god dreams, dreams to spill,

to flood. Come. The one faith I follow: bliss.

zealous

01 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Waking to the stench of cum and compost.

One more morning. One more old ecstasy.

Waking up with a stranger, with a ghost,

someone else’s dead aunt. You were puffy

with rot, zealous with a whiff of one more

fling, fuck, whatever. I’ve got a nephew’s

hunger for the taboo and your poor, sore

cracked skin. Let the souls of sex addicts choose

me and not the Nether world. Goosebumps came

as you dug your cracked nails into my skin,

as I clutched the sheets and groaned. Willingly

given. Brutally taken … without shame.

Death is a small price to find your fuck-twin.

Celestial desire. Queer mercy.

crossing and fixing

18 Wednesday Oct 2023

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Summer comes dressed in tight blue. So do you,

bewitchingly. Proof that this Craft’s, “glamour,”

is more than just words. I named you: taboo,

godhead, my eldritch ne’er-do-well. You stir

in me and my cum-coked skivvies. Dour night

after night. Mirthlessly awake in bed …

so much glum cum so I named you: ghost-light,

just like religion, but with a godhead

climax. It’s been ages since I have … laughed

myself dizzy; sang, “tight blue/ tight like you;”

took to crossing and fixing. We all want

a bit of unreal; the “itch” in witchcraft;

touch of ghost-skin; to be one of the few

that you’ll gladly return to, just to haunt.

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.

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Historic Research, Poetry, sonnet

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Q: Have you ever wrote a poem or a song that provoked an emotion from you as you were reciting/ performing it? Did it make you cry as you listened to what you were saying?

Travel. Sudden lightning flash in daylight.

A word others use. “So from today I’m

trav’lin’ light.” As in atoms. The white

flash of a device going off. My grime

and bits settling down on your surprised

face. You. Someone had to plant these ghastly

boxes under this hill’s skin. You surmised

there are hundreds. Children have already

stumbled on four. We. Travel with me here.

I want you here when I mess up. Just once.

Wave your hands. Call out my name. You can hear

the light. Count the seconds. The short distance

it takes to get to you. A blur. Crayon

red. I rise up and all at once I’m gone.

The line, “So from today I’m/ travelin’ light,” comes from a Billie Holiday classic.

The background for this poem happened around 12 or 13 years ago when I had exchanged a couple of emails with a volunteer landmine deminer in the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region of Armenia who talked about losing a friend whose device that she had been trying to defuse went off. “She was there and then she wasn’t.” That image stayed with me for a very long time. I’ve done a lot of things in life but nothing compares to those people who are forced to deal with all the unexploded ordnance left behind, often decades later, due to somebody else’s war.

The United Nations estimates that there are currently as many as 100 million unexploded landmines buried around the world. Mines are designed to be difficult to locate and their clearance is costly in terms of both money and lives. It is estimated that, in 2021, more than 5,500 people were killed or maimed by landmines, most of them were civilians, half of whom were children.

To answer your question, I wasn’t expecting this sonnet to get to me as it did. I hadn’t gotten choked up when I wrote it. By the time, though, I got to, “Call out my name,” I had developed that sobbing-stutter one gets when trying to talk and not lose it at the same time. It was a very odd sensation.

stirrin’

16 Friday Jun 2023

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Monsters are rare, being mostly sleazeball

dreams and inventions. To be infertile,

Crone of Raunchy Calves & Posh Booty Call

Shorts, is to be obscene. “What? This? Evil?

I’ve been doin’ this before you were born.

Wham bam, thank you, ma’am.” You cackle and pause.

“Men called me witch. Sappho called me pure porn.

I’ll call you … Raw meat.” For some, menopause

killed their libidos. For you? “These itches

get me drippin’,” you grin, spreading your heat

wide. “Scratch me right here, moon dog. My witch’s

cauldron demands … stirrin’.” You’re not discrete

as you scratch, like cum-sloshed selfies you send

to your children, dubbed, “Mom & Cub Offend.”

willendorf

05 Monday Jun 2023

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With my thick, awkward fingers you taught me

to plait your hair. Boundless hips like the earth,

you had said. Lizzo-fierce. Big Grrl sexy.

You can’t be a MILF without belly-birth

curves, thighs like mountains. Before work, after

your kids are at school, you’d drip, dark like plum

juice, like my tongue slick between, like a prayer

down for the Willendorf. Clits thrum, cunts cum,

you’d said. Neighbors talked, “look at them, howling

on her stoop, with some of the worst braided

cornrows ever.” They scowled, “and at her age?”

Fierce looks like many things, but fierce fucking

looks like this. Beyond rude. Beyond wicked.

Beyond the haters and all their daft rage.

][][

Notes:

Venus of Willendorf is a 30,000 year old statue, unearthed in 1908, and thought to be some sort of fertility idol by many male archaeologists at the time due to its, “exaggerated,” sexual features, and not, say, just simply erotic for desire’s own sake. This is why so many archaeologists are horrible at their jobs. When I refer to Lizzo as a, “goddess who walks among us,” what I mean is that she is revolutionary in the deepest sense of that term. She is giving voice and making change happen in a world toxic with body-shaming and fatphobia. She tells us, “I love normalizing the dimples in my butt or the lumps in my thighs or my back fat or my stretch marks. I love normalizing my Black-ass elbows. I think it’s beautiful.” Amen.

linked

03 Saturday Jun 2023

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Back when lust was thought of as a, “wasting

madness,” and wombs wandered through the body,

the old gray poets got off on chiding

children with tales of satyr sex, orgies

in oak groves and dryads who’d swing both ways.

Carnal qualities of beasts were also

a theme, “Never let a bull leave you dazed,

soaked in lavish discharge.” They didn’t know

about clits or cocks; just their dull rancor

that Pan would, “get you with child,” if he caught

you in the farm fields, wet with, “onanism.”

They lived their lives blind to all orgasm

linked souls, to all the lessons flesh has taught.

Come with me, friend, we have worlds to explore.

][][

Notes:

It’s hard not to think of the Victorian-era in Britain as a second Dark Ages, when “experts,” ignorant about both healthy sexual attitudes and the female anatomy, reigned supreme. It was such a primitive time that doctors diagnosed, “madwomen,” as suffering from, “Ophelia’s Malady,” not because there was a shred of science behind it but because Shakespeare wrote about it, so it must be true. I bring this all up because those attitudes have followed us into the 21st century. There is still a profound gulf between the erotic and spiritual. For many, any sexual act not chained to reproductive purposes is sinful and suspect. The penalty for not being chaste is still the label, “whore,” along with the dire warning that if you don’t keep your libido under control “bad things” will happen, anything from unwanted pregnancies, to same sex desires or bestiality (and true to their tyrannical beliefs it’s all one and the same). These are pitiful, broken souls masquerading as god-fearing adults. People so obsessed with genitals and what they’re used for that it calls to mind that other Shakespeare quote about the sincerity of hypocrites, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” After all, phobias tend to start with the fear and rejection of what’s already inside.