Tag Archives: Lilith

mother monster sire lady

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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“Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find their meaning frightening.” ― Floriano Martins

4th PRAYER:

What could catch Lilith? A djinn’s brass bottle?
A song? A prayer? No one could catch Isis,

and she was twice as old. A human skull
is not constructed to house a goddess;

She is vast, like a sand storm, like a djinn.
Mother monster, sire, lady. I am Thirst.

I am Hunger. There isn’t enough sin
here to feed a soul. Sin, like a sun-burst,

is far beyond human control. Make me
arch. Make me dreadful. I’m nothing but loss.

But I believe. Hunger. Thirst. These answers
will not save my soul. I am vain and She

who I’ve caught in a bottle, like a cross,
like a book, will always hate her captors.

summoning

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams …” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.

1st PRAYER:

Wake and watch dawn pour over the desert;
as it does everyday in the city

of Jeddah, in Babylon. She searched for
Lilith among the corpses the raiders

leave for the vultures for she has waited
lifetimes, another dawn, one more sunset,

for this. Out on the Sahara’s low lip
something entered her wrists, thin fingers stirred,

touching, just once, nails kissing each other.
All I tell you is a secret, a need

beyond word, beyond sound, silence, until
the silence releases something like prayer,

like song. She sat in the sand, drew circles
with her curved horn-blade. It is hard not to fall

in love with blades, with rage, with a war like blades.
It was a summoning from the silence,

from Lilith, the First Wife, the First Lover.
She threw down the curved-horn, turned to the south.

A Bedouin widow sat on a dune,
watching the girl watching the vast sand storm

approach, washing over everything; pulsing
with what the ancients called destruction of life.

by moon and crossroad

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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3rd PRAYER:

Mother of a mixed multitude, seeking
Lilith but not her flesh nor the image

of her flesh not the bone nor the clicking
of tongue not the brain wearing its damage

as mask not the mind with its false color
and not this and not that I have followed

the dim tracks of the Bedouin mother
following the girl by moon and crossroad

following the sand storm. I love rough seas.
I love their power. I’m not smart enough

to get out of their way. I want the myth
of the desert to fall in love with me.

Consume me. I call upon the mischief,
the sand, all that they call Mother Lilith.

venus de la mer

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

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–venus of the sea

Heartbreak housed in the side, my Butch Venus
break, a chrysalis of horn and fog —Ball
of sea, of water, leaden —Buxomness
with the rod of Lilith. Den of shape —all
her whelps shot through the fin, wrenched by fishers
men, their bud and plague. The long voice. Water-
handed grave and rancid; drowners —rivers
of blood. Country of sea, boxed. My lover
rises. Fathoms. Cold cross the bar —Inhale
her dead seeds, jelly-fish egg, the green grave
and the dew of acid —My lover’s breath
drove her on —up —out —gasp now —now exhale.
Breath you’ve come. In waves you’ve come. Waves, death, wave.
Crave the grave’s breath —de la mer —in for death.

lilith from the book of splendor

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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“… thou Lilith of the desert, thou hag, thou ghoul … naked art thou sent forth, unclad, with hair disheveled, and streaming down your back.” — part of a recovered Babylonian prayer to cast evil spirits out of one’s house.

I.
Out of sorts types of glamor of a good
death is a glamor of a good lay in
the wilderness where we once laid, for you
said it was tremendous to be that lost
gayly knowing that all that remains just
so, step out of my shallow depression.

II.
I took some vine and vined it through the glow
of her concealed, she was concealed at high
noon; you could see through her. Her glow was not
swamp flame, more blue iris, more moon flame if
the moon burned between her two dark shoulders.

III.
Spinsterhood, they called it. Torturous Tongue,
Woman’s Shame, Impure. They called it a lot
of queer and odd words. I dreamed of her owl
feet, her cat eyes and her four breasts. I dreamed
of that alien word for ecstasy.

IV.
Who could find me? She brought me a bastard’s
knife from out of the goldenrod, brought me
to a hut. She said, “arise,” and I did.
She said, “enter,” and I did deep inside
was a room full of tiny snakes all burned
to soft, small, nameless ash. Stir the coals then

V.
lie down in the field. Cut a door into
yourself and sprinkle the ash in. When it
opens a crow will caw out, over and
over. Outside jackal and hyena
will stop fighting and watch. Outside satyr
will stop singing and watch. All that moves, all
that flies, all that creeps. The sun returning
to this glamor death in the wilderness
where we laid all down now you must see that
all that remains here is a depression.
.
.
NOTE:

The Babylonian prayer I used in the beginning of the poem comes the book The Holy and the Profane (Gaster, 27)

genesis of lilith

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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The dull elk, all beast-eyed and slow, mounting

some sort of grotesque heifer, each nipple

as long as your thumb. She was their offspring,

or close to it. Dim-witted and docile.

Breeder. Eve. They say, “Lilith seduced her.

Lilith knew no shame.” In a world where man

was a limp failure, wouldn’t you? Lover

Of All The Flesh, She Of The Two-Heart Clan,

Girl With Locust Wings. Men who never knew

love will tell you the damnedest lies. Lilith

betrayed Eve — went down on Eve — sucked Adam’s

cum out — gagged it all down, then off she flew —

Bollocks. There is no bisexual myth

only the tale of the world’s first threesome.

dark one

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Feminism, Illustration and art, Lilith, Poetry

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jellies

Still-life with Lilith and a night-blooming
sea rose. You are hard and I’m soft with song,
with all the love born long ago from your
song. I’ve found that loving bitter sick-sweat
from any other out of the question.

What can make certain songs flame into life?
and other songs will simply drown out? Dark
One in the vast depths, I know your name but
will not speak it. I have swam with shark gods
and felt no fear. Maximus of Tyre wrote
that Sappho was “small and dark,” but Plato
called her beautiful. I’ve gone to the cliff
where she threw herself into the churning
undertow, saw how you came to claim her.

I dream of you, cameltoe and all. Blue,
blue is the sea. Red, red is your last kiss.
Green, green your first spliff and sip of vodka.
Shark-soul, spirit-lover. I love soft boys
and stone-hard women: the queen and the butch.
I love the sea rose blooming in your hair.

how she came

09 Friday Aug 2013

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Darkness. Darkness. And then words. Ma-ma-ma
and Ha-ha-ha. Hit a rock, it splinters,

you say. First there was the Sun and the Moon,
Yahweh and Shekhinah, Good and Evil.

But pairs do not interest, for in-between
the sun and moon lies the Milkyway and

from the flesh of Yahweh and Shekhinah
arose double-heads and hermaphrodites,

night jars and what’s called pleasure. I brushed rouge
into her cheeks, painted black kohl around

the rims of her eyes; tied up her hair. She
was something else. An ironwood stick. Shattered

stone. The first words ever spoken: ma-ma-
ma. Her flesh was sea-salty with darkness.

Rising on a tongue rooted deep within.
All poetry needs primordial roots.

lilith: an invocation and reply

08 Thursday Aug 2013

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1: INVOCATION

In the sea-lapped waves you roamed. Across years
you roamed – war years, love years, blood years – any
place that knew of the moon’s pull and the clits
and cunts and the sweat-kissed thighs of lovers.
I have looked for you in Sumeria,
Babylon and Persia. I have hunted
through Canaanite lands; talked to the Hebrew
and Teutonic tribes. Everywhere your love
was a sin, your books burned, your name a curse.

][][

Lilith, lover-mother, exile, fire-haired,
she-demon of the wasteland. If no one
will declare devotion to you I must
do so now and if no one will write books
of splendor for you I must write one now.

][][

In Sumer you were called Lil, storm spirit.
Among the Semite tribes you were confused
with the word for dark night, layil, the source
of all erotic nightmares, nocturnal
orgasms. In Syria they called you
Lamashtu, the child killer, the Winged One,
the Strangleress. You were Adam’s equal,
wife of the devil Samael and the king
Ashmodai, the Queen of Sheba, female
of Leviathan. You were old Yahweh’s
consort while Shekhinah was in exile.

][][

All this you were, but today all these names
are meaningless: Impure Female, Night Jar,
Dame Donkey Legs, Vixen Spirit, The End
Of All Flesh, Harlot, Mi Bruha, Yangu
M’chawi, Al Basti, Midwife, Bitch, Witch.

][][

Everywhere I looked I found you. Across
years and in the sea-lapped waves. In these clits
and these cunts brimming and overflowing;
in this simple form of prayer; in gushing
devotion sticky on my chin, giving
all of us both the sweet and the bitter
and the proof of all this is on my lips.

.
2: REPLY

There is pain here but this marsh is wide, thick
with dune grass. Fill your hips with my moonlight.
I have followed your tracks, lit deep blue flames
to guide you here. Like the tide you must come
soon. We’ll burn the sun in the firmament
with the hurting fire we call desire.