Tag Archives: Poetry

tension

06 Saturday Oct 2018

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Tension all day. Not drug addled shakes. Not
that coy, mad disquiet soothed, by and by,

from an end of an orgasm. I’m caught
between jitter and soul’s strain. A horsefly

on an ass’s fat haunch. I feel friction
tug at the red thread of my fate. Lewdest

of love: sin. It’s how Sade’s lust has eaten
me brunt. Me grin. Then, am I a sadist?

¡Ai! to myself. — Someone has ridden me
hard. Not who, but what. Something. Some damn thing

from the graveyard where I pray has ridden
me last night. Now I’m vexed. Now I worry

how to cleanse the tension that the dead bring
when you’ve finally got their attention.

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.

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.

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.

niña roja

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

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NIÑA ROJA, Red Girl. SANTA MUERTE,

Lady of Death. I pray to you: bring me

 

the ghost of she who told me to obey

my dream: “Love, come to the cemetery,

 

find my grave.” NIÑA, you know I’m sinful

in bed. MUERTE, you know that I’m honest

 

in my perversions. She came to me, full

of ghost blood and ghostly lust. Now my lust

 

keeps me awake at night. If she’ll return

once more I’ll bless my next nine orgasms

 

in your name, bring you cinnamon and burn

your red candles. NIÑA, shaker of limbs.

 

MUERTE, Saint Death, I beg of you, again,

bring this lovesick ghost back to me. Amen.

[cur][tailed]

21 Tuesday Aug 2018

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Bless dawn. Breathe in fumes: quagmire or morass.

Frenzy with bong, with thong, with rot that smells.

 

Not fit for each, for pressing on. Blown glass,

twisted cotton, a necklace of conch shells.

 

Mess of brawn. The stress of faun legs, satyr

hips, the slur of rapture. But I — rudely

 

stamped and curtailed — greet dawn with the glamour

of meat past prime. Let me dillydally,

 

me loaf. None are waiting for me. None want

to see me stoned, clad in only a lash.

 

Rattle of shells and glass. Rattle of brawn

and bone. If this is frenzy its the gaunt

 

haunt of throat-fucking sort. Like fame, like hash,

like all the horrors that we’ll ever spawn.

cinders

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Rive as I reach your core — primordial

fornication sprung from the dripping roots

 

of the world tree, cum and splinter. Vernal

equinox. “Toute la nuit.” Dusk fruit’s

 

marrow. I know something about stirring

the tree’s flurry. I, too, have been lovesick.

 

These scars are not from others. The slicing

of my flesh I do myself, just to pick

 

at scabs. Burn stumps. Lightning strikes. I despoiled

that gap, gouged out half my soul. A rough ride,

 

Oui, but it can be done. You want passion

and I want …? to sink into your roots: coiled,

 

packed, tight. All my metaphors leave you pried

loose, pulped with cinders, tattered, all riven.

tatterhood

12 Sunday Aug 2018

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I have followed the asphalt of your spine’s

rough mile; on down by swelter-greased steepness;

 

by back alley’s cant; by your obscure shrine’s

massive quaking hills — into your darkness

 

— shivering dark. This red-tongue landscape.

Tatterhood. Gaped girl-thing in dark jungle.

 

I must gauge this myth by the span and shape

of your splayed-out hips, the taste of your skull,

 

where your fox-headed guide leads me to play.

To pray at your shrine — to out fox the fox —

 

to gauge your gape stretched lush and surreal.

I’ll breathe in your dark, your ideal. The way

 

city’s breath makes a park real — or a box

breathing in the ground makes broken bones real.

squirrel-cry

10 Friday Aug 2018

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This glum bedlam. This sober and sexless

essence. This — I gave up to get better.

 

Others kiss. Others fuck. Others say, “Yes.”

Recall slick thighs, clenched teeth; what came after.

 

Recall, too, that I was once someone’s balm.

Sodden and gorged. Crafted in beauty, formed

 

in lust. Salve for a burning heart. Maelstrom

in those tender hollows. To be transformed

 

like this. To be sloppy in my moans. Curl

of lip. Nails stubbed. What came after heaving

 

upon sweat-soaked sheets making chit-like squirrel

grunts. What came much later with abstaining.

 

Why did you let your squirrel-cry come undone?

Even the morning breeze feels forsaken.

hoar frost

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

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I must be careful. I am too in touch

with the wild. The wild in me. There are fish

 

that dream under the black ice. I would clutch

them, suck on their spines, for I am ghoulish

 

when it comes to design. I was designed

for ill. Ill use. Ill skill. My misshapen

 

passions, after a fashion — thick as rind,

hard as crust — follow all that is heathen:

 

cast out. No Eden for me. Hoar frost — hot,

hairy, bad — runs wild in me. I would taint

 

you. Besmirch your faith the way that the ice

lulls the fish to sleep. To leave you distraught;

 

leave you wanting. I shall betray your faint

faith in love. Love is no virtue. It’s vice.