Tag Archives: ars poetica

thunderhead

09 Wednesday Mar 2022

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Half a mile high. Book open. Pen drooping

in one hands; the hand that writes secret words.

Just as the in-flight drinks are served something

enters. “Sounds like dementia. It’s absurd;

ghosts and gods and stuff.” I’ve done deep damage

with my drinking; taken blows to my head.

Who knows? Half a mile high and a mirage

enters me. Shadows? The dark thunderhead

out my window? “Sounds like that Twilight Zone

Gremlin.” On Thursday I’ll be fifty-two.

“Vo’chinch,” my pen writes. Nothing? Good enough.

Good? I’m a half-assed conduit. I’ve grown;

not wiser, just … vaguer. Just … the one who,

miles high, mumbles of ghosts and gods and stuff.

][][

Note:

Armenian, an ancient language I am forever butchering when I try to talk, has the most useful word in the world, “Vo’chinch,” (Ոչինչ) an expression that literally means, “Nothing,” but is used in the same way that the French use, “Comme ci Comme ca” — neither good nor bad, it just is.

gauche

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

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We all bleed; I’m just ill-bred about it.

Of the twenty-seven holes so far bored

through my flesh all were amateurish, split

seconds of poor choices. There’s no reward

for a gauche childhood other than blatant

bleeding while your betters smirk. Oscar Wilde

never tripped on rusty farm equipment.

No one in Bronski Beat had such reviled

puncture wounds. Jinkies! I hear their peevish,

“Tsks,” each time I must take off my trousers.

Tsks and, “If you call that mutilating.”

Twenty-seven scars and not one foppish

gaffe; just crackups, buckshot, brass knucks, a spur.

–– Redundant wounds. –– Tedious hemorrhaging.

construe

14 Tuesday Dec 2021

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Somehow now I’ve cheapened delirium.

These days I float with a fever above

my bed, staring down at my husk in glum

humor. Dear foul body, I want to love

you, but damn! Even cirrhosis never

caused me this much grief and it was killing

me. Float and fret. Float and sweat in a blur

of noise that I can’t construe while passing

skyward. Once I thought consumption cool:

burbling blood just like Paganini.

Black-flecked spittle was so gothic. But now?

Niccolò, when I said, “Give me an old-school

death,” it wasn’t this; rather skag, filthy

deeds and all that deliria might allow.

][][

Notes:

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) was a violin virtuoso so astonishingly talented that it was rumored that he had sold his soul to the Devil for his crazy skills. Like Dunbar, Chopin, Kafka, Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson, Paganini also died from TB (tuberculosis). Skag is an old nickname for heroin. On a personal note, I mention cirrhosis (a disease of the liver from chronic alcoholism) because I am a life-long alcoholic who would be dead right now if it weren’t for AA (this February 18 will mark four whole years of sobriety for me). While my doctor insists it was not Covid and just borin’ ol’ pneumonia, last year I was bed-ridden for months due to a painful, horrible cough that wouldn’t go away. With the coming of winter I can feel, once again, something in my lungs.

profundo

01 Wednesday Dec 2021

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That was the year the cicadas started

in my skull. Their buzz-saw droning; the fraught

song of dust and summer, I’m told. Bleated

noise. It came with the pneumonia. I thought

it was part of the fever. If my ghost

shark can haunt me during delirium

why not raucous bugs in the innermost

depths of my ear? Soon my fever’s bedlam

faded but the sing-song did not. Even

now, love, as I write this, the din’s low groan

keeps me distraught. I wake with radio

static, thinking the dark bellowed. Listen.

Only I can hear it, that deep bass drone;

what hell’s divas call, “Basso profundo.”

][][

Notes:

In opera the lowest vocal range that a tenor can go is called basso profundo. Starting around a year ago I began developing tinnitus, a ringing in the ears like radio static that is often accompanied by hearing loss. In the last two months or so it has gone from a dull buzz that I could ignore to a much louder droning which wakes me up at night. I find the sort of disconnected musing I need, such as when I’m writing, harder now.

chars

07 Sunday Mar 2021

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Next time you’ll count the scars. There will be more.

Grizzled, you’ll think. Frost burn. It takes time

 

for me to undress. Stitches hold my gore

in place for now. This pain isn’t sublime,

 

the sort that shamans use. It’s not De Sade’s

doomsday, either. First time I saw someone

 

tear at their clothes as they transformed gnawed

at me for weeks. I will be fifty-one

 

in less than a week. If I come back all

grizzle gray and limping will you confuse

 

me for the Moon? I can read all the scars

on her face. Can you read mine? This queer scrawl

 

that spells my fate each time these stitches ooze

fevered flames. Heat that grizzles. Heat that chars.

phlebotinum

15 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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My words are lascivious prayers, priestess,
and my temple lies in fiber optics,

cyberspace. Sexting is the new Venus,
our ars poetica. Other matrix

only repeats standard universal ––
baby, aam gonnae make ye buck an’ bleed.

None of that pleases. Through wire and crystal
I weave spells just for you. What do you read?

Words, words, words. Our prayer. I know that you feel
magic at work. We cum with strange forces,

phlebotinum and nasty sub-routines.
Sexting reveals what others must conceal.

Temples wide as the world web. Priestesses
unprogrammed. All these sacred smut machines.

Notes:
Like unobtainium, in science fiction, phlebotinum is whatever made-up technology the lazy author has invented to keep the plot going. It’s magical pixie dust in outer space.

brawling

09 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Little death around your lips makes your smile
somehow sad. Little cum on your chin, eye

liner smudged, your love-bitten throat: I’m vile
to my toys, the ones who say yes, the shy

ones who feel a bit queer. Vile with a touch
of slash-and-burn joy, brawling bliss. I’ll salt

the sour earth that you’re buried in. You’ll clutch
at my hips, gag-spit at my cock’s assault

on your throat. I make a foul god, bad dad,
beastly boyfriend, but a good friend to those

who laugh at this. You say sex. I say soul.
We write about all that we’ve never had.

Little death, I’m shy; tad queer with sorrows,
tad sad only words let me lose control.

blue-fox acid

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Feminism, Poetry, sonnet

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All my sisters are feminists; all my
mothers gods. But, like in Recovery,

there are three passions that I still deny
I do: 1) Of the tricksters, that foxy

blue-fox acid drove all my low gnostic
thoughts. 2) Once cum was our libation;

now it’s sacrifice. 3) I was shaman
for you, infidel. Back when seraphic

truths felt down and dirty, I thought constant
carnal acts could free us, since chastity

was a curse. I was wrong both times, clearly.
Odd. These days there’s no talk of cock or cunt,

and though I have the blood of witch and nerd,
somehow, “lechery,” is just one more word.

should’ve

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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Three times, before I was one, something tried
to pull me back. When the San Gabriel

fault-line shook. When the firestorm and landslide
consumed the Malibu hills. When I fell

in the deep end at the Lil’ Angels Fun
Pool. Yes. There were other attempts, later,

but those were my failures. For eleven
short months in L.A. earth, fire and water

strove to claim me. Some curses get to hide
from us. Call it misfortune, my mom did.

Before I was her mistake she called me
her bad luck baby; one who should’ve died.

I’ve no memories of being that kid —
just what came after, what taught me to flee.

coup d’etat

03 Sunday Mar 2019

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

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That’s the knife called: She Slits Open.
Once I sang that I’d slice open my gut,

reach in and drag out loops of intestine
if it ever got that bad. Before smut

and my sonnets I lived in Las Vegas,
crossroad of ghosts. I carried her with me

all the time: at the Shrine of the Goddess,
in class, at the gym. I was one sissy

hellbent on going out like Mishima.
Honor is queer, though: once it got that bad

only survival could prove them all wrong —
prove my fey soul is strong — Cosmic Vulva

strong — strong as the ghosts calling me comrade.
Stronger than this old belly-slitting song.

NOTE:
Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author and literary luminary, obsessed with beauty, homoeroticism and death. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his secret militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took the commandant hostage and tried to persuade the soldiers there to join in overthrowing the new pacifist government in a coup d’etat. When this was unsuccessful, Mishima committed seppuku, ritual suicide by cutting open his belly.

She Slits Open