rattlebone

22 Saturday Sep 2018

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You brood, walk through the graveyard night after
futile night — calling on ghosts to love you

but you forget yourself. You’re no lover,
no tramp, no paramour. You misconstrue

signs. You make a cheapjack witch. Your love craft
is not love at all; it’s pure want. It’s need

gone all rough and unfulfilled. You have laughed
at your loveless life. If ghosts feed on greed

then you could screw a crew with the longing
inside you. But now you don’t laugh. The dead

have no use for you, just like the living —
Graveyard empty. You hunger. Love unfed.

Deprived. Depraved. Wolfish. Delirious
rattle-boned. Ravenous without purpose.

gimme some

21 Friday Sep 2018

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Rueful for a dead lover. For three nights
I have been at the graveyard’s dirt crossroads

praying for a wanton haunt. No ghost-lights.
No arms that hold me down; kiss that explodes

in chill across my skin; voice in my ear
going, “shhh, baby.” I’ve abused this skin,

dripped blood and cum in the dirt; read Shakespeare,
Sappho, Blake out loud. All the discipline

I’ve learned keeps me coming back but I cum
alone. Each morning my Love-Crone candle,

Lilith root, Follow Me Ghost trick remains
untouched, sperm-sticky, contrite. “Gimme some,”

the song goes, “Dead girl/ Gimme some.” Rueful
for what must lay beyond these veiled domains.

potluck

17 Monday Sep 2018

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I am naked inside the room to match
my nude mood. I cannot rub the strangeness

from my sight as I pass the mirror. Thatch
of curls. Plump root. An ass to make Venus

jealous. I am a beast with sublime thighs.
You call me, “Daddy.” I call you, “Potluck;”

cumming with you is always a surprise —
Who else cock-slaps your face? With the havoc

of crude sex comes a crude enlightenment.
When you return from class I’ll press my face

in your ass, tongue your clit. May your grand mal
climax be rough like passion; be urgent

like love. I am vain but constant like grace
when you say, “Daddy, break your little doll.”

gristle

15 Saturday Sep 2018

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

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We are still of use though the gash smells sour,
amethyst rot. We’re twitching devices —

sanded bones and stitches. The worms devour
all that the obsidian knife slices:

meaty scads and sheaves of skin. This butcher’s
love of gristle, of grotesqueness, of boils

that one picks at when they wish the blisters
to burst. The mirror knows how darkness spoils

when cast from its surface. We are of use
because we dream. The stone scalpel cannot.

The hand behind it won’t. Dreams of clabber.
Dreams of grubs in the lesion. We seduce

all that the suture holds dear: curdle, clot,
congeal. Dreams of May rot. Dreams of canker.

fatty batty

13 Thursday Sep 2018

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Naked under your oil-soaked overalls,
I lead you behind the filling station

to peel down, press you up against the wall’s
rough brick. You love ball bearings, oil, engine

grease, rough fucks while your husband drunkenly
snores next door. We use one of his condoms.

“A bit tight,” I admit as the frothy
acid begins to drip. When your cunt spasms

I shift to your “fatty batty” — molten
baby bhang and blue cheer. Your dreads hang down.

Your eyes closed. Your daughter will be home soon.
There’s an engine needing your attention.

Just now, though, you’re shaking, all pleasure-frown,
all unquenchable, all Saint Kitts monsoon.

Quote

quote unquote

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
we drank our liquor straight,
some went upstairs with Margery,
and some, alas, with Kate;
and two by two like cat and mouse
the homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
and Marion, cow-eyed,
opened their arms to me but I
refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
in which to mope my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in
the orchards of our mothers,
and hearts that we broke long ago
have long been breaking others;
tears are round, the sea is deep:
roll them overboard and sleep.

W.H. Auden, “SONG OF THE MASTER AND BOATSWAIN.”

colony

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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Your path is in the sea, your path is in the great waters and your footsteps are not known. — from, Psalm 77

Rusty iron ore tramp steamer painted pink
with a great garden of vegetables up

on deck. A tribe of wayfarers, with ink
and love, to sail the steamer, to worship

the waves and all of us in it. Gorgeous
sea-rose, wide mid-ocean. A colony

of cats, of cast-off children, of purpose
other than all this land-locked misery.

Fresh food, fresh water, fresh love; the rhythm
of the voyage slumbers in us. Sea trance

and dream. I want part of this tribal blood
of friends and lovers — in a rust-bottom

pink ship. I want a myth and a romance.
I want a voyage both wild and sacred.

murk

08 Saturday Sep 2018

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Fruitcake and sludge love, a love-smudge, dried crust
crusting my nails. Few ghosts come back with pride,

with tales. On our last shift you were tied, trussed,
crotch-rope spreading your pudendal cleft wide

under your scrubs. Release, in all its forms:
from me, from work, that cum-sticky murk smell,

cirque-slush fog. I know how a nurse transforms
with bliss of rope kissing her, “pumpkin shell.”

Bad joke. “Peter, eat her.” Very well: last
kiss, last shift through your cottons. Moist as cake,

as fruit — as the mistake we want and yearn
for, crusts our nails. In the future our past

falls from us — Call this the sort of mistake
that leaves behind only ghost-tales, rope-burn.