19 Tuesday Sep 2023

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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.

quenched

31 Wednesday May 2023

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This is not Whitman’s city of orgies,

flesh and funky like the poet declared.

This is a courtyard without grass or trees.

At night it’s the only space that we’ve dared

venture into. My mouth glued to your hard

nipples. Your tongue tangy from the cold-salt

of my skin. Kissing each finger, the scarred

flesh of my arms, each shiny pink-cobalt

slice. The world falls for hard men and soft boys;

since I’m neither I have no purpose here …

except to please you. Down the fire escape.

Against the wall. Haunted with city noise;

as in, your cunt quenched without shame or fear.

My ghost fingers. My cadaverous shape.

][][

Note:

The good, gray poet, Walt Whitman, once referred to Manhattan as, “the city of orgies,” which still makes me chortle whenever it comes up in conversation.

barmy

28 Sunday May 2023

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

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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.

drive-thru

26 Friday May 2023

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Kissing at the red light you’d pull your scrubs

to your knees and let me inhale. What’s one

more stain to a nurse? Hints of Doms and Subs

had hit a nerve. “My husband isn’t fun

like that,” you murmured. After the drive-thru

I’d go down on you, tonguing inner thighs,

belly folds, cleavage and cleft. “Make me spew.”

And you did. A scent of girl cum, French fries

and pine would cling to me all day. Sluice rhymes.

Anxious breath. Things that adults did, I thought,

were weird. Was this cool? Fonzie-level cool?

Who knew? It was how we spent our lunchtimes.

You with this anxious child. “It’s our secret,”

you’d say, dropping me back at middle school.

][][

Notes:

With his trademark, “Ayyy,” dressed in a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle, Arthur Fonzarelli, better know as Fonzi or The Fonz, was a character from the 1970-80s TV show, Happy Days … and I was at that age where the pinnacle of cool had to be either David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Fonzi, even with that episode where he jumped the shark.

bodyke

24 Wednesday May 2023

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“An’ oi double dag dare yer,” you giggled,

slipping out of your jeans. The Red Cedar

river was rank, sluggish and straggled

across campus. Still, where else could, “lager

louts,” go skinny dipping? Exchange students

were freaks. County Clare vibe tribe? Bodyke cock

shock? You started each sentence with, “me cunt’s

fancy.” Groovy. You loved punk. I loved schlock.

Between dark flowing kisses you reached down,

grabbed my ass and impaled yourself on me.

Back when I’d do anything for a dare;

even if it meant that I’d cum and drown.

Perhaps others stopped to watch our drunk glee.

Aglow, you sighed, “loike oi’m back ‘um in Clare.”

][][

Notes:

The Red Cedar river runs through Michigan State University, where I went for my undergraduate studies. Lager lout is slang for any offensively drunk, boorish behavior. Bodyke is a town in County Clare, Ireland.

kafir

23 Tuesday May 2023

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“Hair is a nakedness,” your mother taught ––

which is why you kept yours veiled. And, “never

bring home white boys or kafirs.” Those were fraught

times. If schisms can start from mere fractures

after school ran riot in my bedroom ––

as inch by heathen inch pushed past your hips’ fleece;

a slow burn in piercing you to your womb ––

Your hair bare. Our flesh awash in sweat, grease

and cum. “When I graduate,” you said, “She’ll

send me home.” She’d pledged you to a cousin.

“Three months!” you cried. We rampaged in secret.

We were dissent’s loving revolt. “Yesh, spill

your seed … on my face!” Three months of heathen

bliss, like what the dumb beasts do when they rut.

][][

Notes:

Kafir is a derogatory term in Islamic tradition and refers to a non-Muslim.