Tag Archives: Poetry

aftermath

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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When she comes I’ll go find my hungry blade
from Morocco. When she comes, using all
the bright noise from her song just to buy me,
when she snaps her fiddle strings at long last,
when all those strings are broken and she comes
like a cartoon blow job, sloppily drawn,
unconvincing and all down the face, then
I will know that I do not belong here
with you. I will step through the font of this
unwritten poem full of amazement,
wondering why I didn’t reach for my
curved blade sooner? If there is real safety
with others I have not found it; exiles
have no home, orphans no family, though
they are both precious to the earth. It’s how
we spend our time that I find intriguing.
Eternity is a problem only
for the easily distracted. Give me
daisies, the silence of daisies. Give me
my knife so that I might bleed all over
the silence. So that when she comes I will
tell her that our aftermath has left me
curvy and hissing. There is no question,
just a bitter tea made from wild foxglove
and wormwood When she comes I don’t want to
go looking for my Moroccan stick-knife.
I will bear my belly, I have the guts
for it, though I ask of you do not feel
sad or cry or try to argue with me.
She is coming and I want enough time
to spill everything all over this page.

cock’s crow

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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Dark One, I listen. A dun summer moon

rises, a gap, shun the sky, that space. Space

as the sun slips down into a wet June,

this son with a soul is always wet. Grace

was once a gun or a moth, that of air

but not in the air. Now none and nothing.

What son has a soul? and what sort of prayer

is this? The lascivious nun’s burning

faith. But not like faith. Switch to one shadow

and run halfway home. Daughters run. Daughters

know that the moon-dawn can still stun. Listen,

Dark One. I am a child of the cock’s crow.

The sky scares me for it is always her’s.

What’s left is noise. The cicadas have won.

swung blood

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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Sunflowers, Congo azaleas, sky full
of blood, pull the body down. That wide bad
blade, that steel. That thunk. Here is my fistful
of flesh. Take it. My bargain. I was glad
when they rose against the missionaries,
seeing all their ash was a rude gesture.
There was a girl down the road who shelled peas
with one hand and a stump for the other.
I combed her hair. She talked. The machete
was left behind. “Teach me to swing,” she said.
A gray bright rush. She was from the Congo.
She was ten. Heart, heart look away, for she
swung blood, like an amazon from the dead,
stretching out to deliver the death blow.

last night i was so drunk

12 Monday Aug 2013

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Last night I was so drunk on something more
that I thought for a wild moment that I
had no needs. That I would go to the shore,
into the wild, and let the wild reply
to my song. I’d let the sea speak for me.
I am tired of language. Tired of speaking
to get my point across. For at the sea
I am a child: naked, sun-burned, dreaming
of ships. I shall build a lovely small shrine
just for myself out of sand and seaweed
and give up on language and fickle men.
I’ll walk naked along the wild shoreline,
singing new songs, and never be worried
about being drunk or sober again.

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

Posted by in Erotic, Feminism, Lilith, Poetry

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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.

ghost hunger [rewrite]

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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In this spirit’s world, this less than human
mouth goes down on you. Each chill, ghost fingers
unzip your fly, pull your knickers to one
side, while this ectoplasm tongue slithers
inside. How far out are we? Knuckles deep.
You suck all the air out of your lungs. Vast
forces are at work when twilight can’t sleep.
Delirium and the dead; an outcast
at your gate. This is beyond mingled breath.
Beyond love in the dead years. Do not die
just yet, my lover. Take me as I come
inside you. Then, a small cry, a small death.
Come like sick chaos, like a devil’s cry,
a blood fountain, a ghost hunger, bedlam.

drink you dry

05 Monday Aug 2013

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And we are physical shape; to give voice,
to feel, to give pause, I brush out your hair
(no there was no hairbrush, only a choice
to comb my fingers through the empty air
where your hair might once have been). So tonight
I hope you will not be disappointed.
And since I’ve drunk from your gash of sunlight
I think I’ve become sad at your wasted
beauty. I have a purple bruise on one
ankle. True. I don’t know you as keenly
as I thought I did. I have grown remote
under my skin. No frenzy. Please listen.
Once I drank you dry but now I simply
gag on the rose left blooming in my throat.

wily weird sisters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Don’t trust stories where boys, down in the kelp,
steal seal-skins from nude girls – they all end grisly.
Only a wily weird sister can help
romance a seal-girl. Go out to the sea
in a cow-hide boat. She will stand, murmur
love spells to the waves. The seal will surface,
then climb on board. A watery cat-purr
is sign of a selkie stirred. Seamless
is her fleshy skin, still, she wriggles out
as you cuddle her head and your sister
grips her hips, her mouth on her slit-pout,
licking up a storm. A seal-girl lover
will want you both, will soak your lips and chin.
That’s how you drive a seal out of her skin.

NOTE:

Stories and legends of sea spirits that live as seals in the ocean but have the ability shed their skin to become human on land can be found throughout Iceland, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, Northern England, Scotland and Ireland. The film The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) was based on such a myth.