Tag Archives: Poetry

adástsooʼ

14 Sunday May 2023

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Adááʼ (lip). Atsooʼ (tongue). I might not know

the words for for lust or thrust or that wet greased

growl that you make with jaws stretched as you show

me just how far I can go –– but at least

you taught me to say adástsooʼ. We mapped

out our bodies with skull-fucking, hair

pulling and the heat of the day still trapped

in the skin of your pickup. This is prayer

as well. Not Bilagáana or Dineh

prayer, but still holy. Something to drive nine

hundred miles for. Somewhere out in the owl’s

light a goat bleats. Tomorrow we will pray

again without the need for language, mine

or yours, just our untranslatable howls.

][][

Notes:

In Diné bizaad (the Navajo language), adástsooʼ is the word for the clit. Bilagáana is an older term for white people (such as myself). Owl’s light is another way of talking about the dusk. 900 hundred miles is a reference to Judy Grahn’s “Love rode 1500 miles on a grey hound bus & climbed in my window one night to surprise both of us.” I’ve always adored that poem.

gambol

05 Friday May 2023

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The day is dead and lain in fog – not, “laid

in fog.” That’s when the city’s odd twilight

rolls in, turning streetlights wispy, decayed,

grotesque. Among the shadows our delight

comes when we gambol and glow. All that wet

air, pools of cool oil, smeared by ghostly palms

between your breasts. Morass of dew and sweat.

“Straddle me,” you say, kneeling with maelstroms

in your cunt, tempests in my cock. I curl

down the valley of your cleavage. “Seismic

upheaval?” Indeed. Slickness, all foggy

and cum-splattered around your neck; a pearl

necklace. Drastic love: the sort of drastic

pleasures others just dream about, dimly.

gnawing

24 Monday Apr 2023

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Worms of the flesh. Dreams of rapture. “The dead

do not sleep … at first,” you said, on the night

that you followed me home. From gray sickbed

to gray earth. No salvation. No white light.

No choir singing praise. Just hunger striding

through my doorway, greedy for pillow talk.

“Fuck flesh,” you called yourself, with a gnawing

look. Yes, that look, “Skewer me on your cock.

Eat me. Drink me. Love me. Make much of me.”

The dead are cold; yet you still sweated, hips

twerking, thundering; deluge from a storm cloud.

“Regrets? Since I thought lust was unholy,

never knowing this.” My tongue: on your lips,

between your thighs, under your winding shroud.

callipyge

18 Tuesday Apr 2023

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“Sweet-tooth? Just for jelly rolls.” What I said,

with the cinch of your muscles wrapped around

my cock. What I said, the first time I spread

your cheeks until your sphincter’s puckered mound

gaped wide: “That’s not the arse of a fifty

eight year-old.” Sitting in your dentist chair,

with your scrubs around your knees, I slid three

fingers and a thumb in. If this is prayer

Venus Callipyge would approve. What word

do kids use? “Booty.” Venus with the Huge

Booty. You’ve been married for years and years

and your husband still won’t go there. Absurd.

“Just once,” you said, cumming in a deluge;

without noxious hang-ups or macho fears.

][][

NOTES:

“Some are young, some are old/ My man says sissy’s got good jelly roll,” Ma Rainey sang on Sissy Blues. “My man got a sissy, his name is Mistress Kate/ He shook that thing like jelly on a plate.” Jelly roll, in this case, being slang for one’s arse. Venus, the Roman goddess of lust and beauty, had many manifestations: Venus Anadyomene (Venus “Rising from the Sea”), Venus Barbata (“Bearded Venus”) and Venus Callipyge (“Venus with the Beautifully Large Buttocks”).

roiling

04 Tuesday Apr 2023

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

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In the old sailor prayers their songs go —-

“9 waves, 9 tides, 9 times the sea has come.”

I’ve known only 3 ocean storms. I know,

I’m told, the gods of the sea are gruesome.

Even now, with the rain falling in sheets,

something vast and deep, full of roiling clouds

with long, tangled strands that lurches and beats

on the deck, howling through the stays and shrouds,

halyards and braces, hungers. I hunger,

too. 3 times this hunger has come. With you,

like the old sea prayers, I would make it 9.

I am full of lascivious anger —-

but you knew that when you kissed me. You knew

this storm would be both grotesque and divine.

godhead

17 Friday Mar 2023

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With blood, cramps and acne came the hijab,

the veil. “Feel blessed that you have a gorgeous

godhead dwelling in your bones.” With a stab

of my tongue I wriggled in. Lewdness

isn’t metaphor but pure parasite.

Like their Holy Laws, I’m an acquired

taste. “Don’t go,” you said on our 7th night,

since you now desire what I once desired:

a new language found in our gasps and purrs.

Your own eldritch ne’er-do-well to rouse “goo”

in your cum-caked skivvies as your mirthless

parents sleep. A companion with fingers,

making circles in the moonlight. In you.

This, too, is sacred; like lust, like solace.

effects

17 Friday Feb 2023

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In old sex comedies, orgasmic cries

were changed into operatic high notes.

That wet ¡shlick!-roar you make between your thighs

would have caused a panic. For them, “Deep Throat,”

was a code name and, “Pink Eye,” a virus.

This is sacred: your blood shot eyes, lashes

gummy with my cum, your sweaty, “thickness,”

cleansed in the bath. Others cling to stigmas

and fears about sex. Since we’re divas who

can’t sing, we choose the real thing. No censors

or sound effects; just, “O! Cum on my face.”

The Gods adore such mettle. We, who spew

prayers in their praise, like all feral lovers,

each time the Gods bestow orgasmic grace.

lurid

19 Saturday Nov 2022

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You know, in films, when a Twist-jane lounges

by a flophouse window, in crepe mousseline

drawers, that she must be glum; crooning, “Diva’s

Cathouse,” and, “Heartbreak Hotel,” and, “Virgin

Funk.” It’s always ten past midnight; next door

your love-worn gunsel answers on his horn …

keeping it low. The sad are always poor

in films. We slouch since love makes us forlorn

and lean and use words like, “hooch,” and, “barfly,”

and, “skint.” Twist-jane, you say? What lurid slang.

Lurid? No, tragic. Like ten past doomsday,

crooning, “I’ll be so lonely,/ I could die;”

like in films where your gunsel blows hard pang

and grief and the only colors are gray.

][][

Notes:

In the noir thriller, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Sam Spade uses the Yiddish term, gunsel (“little goose”), several times to describe Wilmer, Kasper Gutman’s highly problematic “associate.” According to Hollywood lore, the term got by the censors because they thought that Bogart said, “gunman,” though in reality it’s a slur for pretty boys kept for sexual purposes by older men. This being 1940s Hollywood, Wilmer is all that, plus every other gay stereotype the producers could think of: effeminate, soft-spoken and, of course, a psychotic killer.

onesie

15 Tuesday Nov 2022

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“Suckle me,” you said, unzipping the front

of your snow suit. “These are all my hungers;

feed me.” First snow of the year and your cunt

is a damp hint under all these layers.

Under this snow the gods sleep. Passions creep

about in queer forms. Wreaths of fog circle

your head as I wriggle two fingers deep

inside. “So cold,” you groan. “Yes, be brutal,

make my sweet heat come.” Something is coming,

with my hand down your onesie and your face

pressed to my neck … perhaps something wicked?

Perhaps even now the gods are dreaming

about your heat and how my fingers trace

runes in your cum, raw and sacred like blood.

chums & the eight of cups

16 Friday Sep 2022

Posted by in Armenia, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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Q: What is the meaning of the Eight of Cups?

For me, the Eight of Cups is all about how we deal with problematic situations … and by “deal” I mean running away from it. It is a card full of disappointment and regret. This isn’t about being judgmental; the world is full of horrible, no-win situations that only get worse the longer we stay with them. It’s why we have the term, “Survivor’s Guilt,” which often accompanies PTSD. Free will can only take us so far. Or, as Goldsmith reminds us: “He who fights and runs away/ May live to fight another day;/ But he who is battle slain/ Can never rise to fight again.”

That might be true, but often it does not heal a spirit broken by shame and guilt. They say you never know how you’ll react during war until you’ve actually fought in one. I haven’t. I’ve been nearby but that’s not the same. A memory of my time in Peace Corps came back to me yesterday so I wrote this:

All through red suns at dusk. All through dark suns

at dawn. Those low rumbles. I’ve heard thunder.

I’ve heard earthquakes. Neither sound deafens

nor numbs me utterly like gun powder.

Once, while drunk (I was always drunk) some chums

and I drove to the outskirts of Artsakh,

“to watch the fireworks.” Back when my eardrums

were still naïve over certain noise. Raw

and green. The border guards turned us away.

Being dumb we parked on a hill to eyeball

the «pff-boom» flashes down in the valley.

That’s called privilege: turning someone’s doomsday

into drinking games. Fireworks fell. Nightfall

fell. We drank … numbing their rage and fury.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting for decades over an area of land called Artsakh (formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh). While geographically it has been claimed by Azerbaijan its inhabitants are Armenian and since the fall of the USSR Artsakh has been a democratic republic, mainly unrecognized by the rest of the world. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War lasted from 1992–1994. I was living in Yerevan in 1997 while shelling and guerrilla warfare were still going on. It wasn’t the only military conflict happening in the area, though. That same summer I watch plumes of smoke billowing from the foothills around Mt. Ararat as Turkish troops battled Kurdish resistance fighters.