Tag Archives: Poetry

retch

18 Sunday Feb 2024

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

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The gods had ceased singing. My verse had cooled,

then dried up. Nightmares, livid with love, came

with puke and drool, as if I’d somehow fooled

Temperance. As if self-restraint and shame

only bedeviled others. And today? ¬

Six years have passed. The bloat has left my face.

¬ Scars on my liver. ¬ Scars on my wordplay. ¬

Lifetime of scars, self-loathing and disgrace;

cuz’ who dies clean? Pffft. Thomas? Poe? Sexton?

Saints of excess. ¬ Today? This day. ¬ Call this

a small price to pay. ¬ Of these fifty-four

years six were spent sober. Without swollen,

flushed flesh. Without the gods, “taking the piss.”

¬ Without retch. ¬ Without fucking up hardcore.

note.

Today, 2/18/2024, marks my 6th year anniversary of entering Recovery. As they say, one day at a time.

gall

21 Sunday Jan 2024

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

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Tallow in winter. That long-toothed ruin

wrung from drippings. The decay of Eros

dribbling down my wrist. Say it in Latin.

[Demon] [Possession] “Daemonicus.”

Possession. Mine. Flesh rendered so I’m fit

for your gluttony. Yet something fetid

hangs in the frozen air. Frostbit. The bit

that was a nose, two lips, one pale eyelid.

Frostbite leaves the dark pit in my skull

exposed. It takes a certain hungry gall

to snog with just any possessed bastard.

They say if you can’t be a good example

then be a grisly warning. Gouged; I’m all

brittle bone. Now kiss me like a blizzard.

frets

01 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Death is cold. I am cold. I must be death;

thin as rain, thin as chill. My haunt’s haunting.

Thrill of dire distress mixed up with your breath.

Pleases? I am, “of an age,” where nothing

pleases. Even frenzy feels frayed; its pink

velvet border rubbed away. Once, a whiff

of your breath kept me going for days. Kink,

as in kinky. Now? [– –] You cough, snort and sniff

what’s in your sloughed lungs. Kissing the lovelorn

has lost its appeal. [– –] My nipples are hard,

like a mood killer. Once you wrote, “your nudes

are safe with me.” No, they weren’t. Revenge porn,

the kids called it. Even my scars are scarred.

I’m not death. I’m the one who frets and broods.

lavash

27 Wednesday Dec 2023

Posted by in Armenia, Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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There’s dough in my hair, flour on my fingers.

Lick them clean. These fingers. I’m leaving.

Kiss me clean. Obscene what this finger stirs

in you. All day long you’ve seen me making

flat bread. Lavash. Song of cracked wheat. Fable

of dough rolled flat, slapped against the Tonir’s

brick wall. The dead’s flat food and what the skull

won’t eat I will. Breathe in all these odors.

Simple smells at night fall imbued with grief.

When you make bread, you make me; when you roll

dough flat you touch me. I’m leaving; come clean

me one last time. My lips, my flesh, this brief

hint at soul. I’ll be ghostly so soon. Soul,

love me like this: obscene, obscene, obscene.

notes:

Lavash is a popular flat bread in Armenia. Tonir is a stone oven used to cook the bread, similar to an Indian Tandoor.

demotic

12 Tuesday Dec 2023

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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& I yanked your hair until you whimpered

& moaned. I call this, too, a sacred act.

This queer cheer. Odd? Odd that the only pact

between us was no pact at all. Squandered

without ache, spurt or need. Without my root

in your root cellar; stretch marks, scabs, stubborn

scars. Proof that the euphoric brute in Brute

Love is still love. Worship all that return

to yearn for a blinding flash. Milky spurts.

Spasms. Second comings. “Cum unto me.”

I did. Past tense squander. I am a thing

of dusk; a thing that divides & perverts

both day & night. Even murk is holy.

All this demotic. All this queer hexing.

bop

29 Wednesday Nov 2023

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Meet me near the mine shaft. We’ll put “anal”

back in “Bacchanal.” You know my wet-wired

flesh, fat stall-fed steak, the hole in my skull

that lets the gods in. All that you’ve desired

is here; two palm’s worth, plucked from the motley

pelt of some goat; unkempt, tangle-haired, lop

-legged, chewing on the bark of yon gnarly,

oaken bough. I’m the “bop” in your “She Bop.”

The thrill you seek every Sunday in church.

Gods are a dime a dozen. But this thrill?

This kiss? This holy rude exchange? It’s this

that you want. Dreams to make you gasp and lurch

out of bed, goat dreams, god dreams, dreams to spill,

to flood. Come. The one faith I follow: bliss.

zealous

01 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Waking to the stench of cum and compost.

One more morning. One more old ecstasy.

Waking up with a stranger, with a ghost,

someone else’s dead aunt. You were puffy

with rot, zealous with a whiff of one more

fling, fuck, whatever. I’ve got a nephew’s

hunger for the taboo and your poor, sore

cracked skin. Let the souls of sex addicts choose

me and not the Nether world. Goosebumps came

as you dug your cracked nails into my skin,

as I clutched the sheets and groaned. Willingly

given. Brutally taken … without shame.

Death is a small price to find your fuck-twin.

Celestial desire. Queer mercy.

crossing and fixing

18 Wednesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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Summer comes dressed in tight blue. So do you,

bewitchingly. Proof that this Craft’s, “glamour,”

is more than just words. I named you: taboo,

godhead, my eldritch ne’er-do-well. You stir

in me and my cum-coked skivvies. Dour night

after night. Mirthlessly awake in bed …

so much glum cum so I named you: ghost-light,

just like religion, but with a godhead

climax. It’s been ages since I have … laughed

myself dizzy; sang, “tight blue/ tight like you;”

took to crossing and fixing. We all want

a bit of unreal; the “itch” in witchcraft;

touch of ghost-skin; to be one of the few

that you’ll gladly return to, just to haunt.

scars

04 Wednesday Oct 2023

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

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Less than a week. Thirty-five years of war

ended … like that. Already its become

myth. Lands none can return to; one more scar

for the soul. Scars … and the narcissism

that nostalgia brings will be the headstone

on my grave. Holy mountains I’ll never

return to. “Artsakh” comes out like a moan

each time I say its name. You’re dead, lover,

buried near Shusha. “Lick me,” you had said,

one of the things that your husband refused

to do; your tickled pink. Now all Artsakh

has been abandoned along with its dead.

Less than a week. All that forfeited blood

festering. The reek of yearning and shock.

notes.

Shusha is a city in the Southern Caucasus Karabakh mountains (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh). The Republic of Artsakh has, since the fall of the USSR, been fighting for their right of self-determination against their neighbor, Azerbaijan, which sees the entire region as part of its own.

Now [10/4/2023] a week has passed since the ethnic Armenians of Artsakh agreed to a ceasefire, agreeing that by the New Year the Republic will cease to be. It has been estimated that within 48-hours of that declaration more than 100,000 citizens fled Artsakh, leaving behind everything. I’m not Armenian but this loss and the dread of what horrors might entice an entire population to leave has consumed all my days of late, my dreams, my disbelief.

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Historic Research, Poetry, sonnet

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Q: Have you ever wrote a poem or a song that provoked an emotion from you as you were reciting/ performing it? Did it make you cry as you listened to what you were saying?

Travel. Sudden lightning flash in daylight.

A word others use. “So from today I’m

trav’lin’ light.” As in atoms. The white

flash of a device going off. My grime

and bits settling down on your surprised

face. You. Someone had to plant these ghastly

boxes under this hill’s skin. You surmised

there are hundreds. Children have already

stumbled on four. We. Travel with me here.

I want you here when I mess up. Just once.

Wave your hands. Call out my name. You can hear

the light. Count the seconds. The short distance

it takes to get to you. A blur. Crayon

red. I rise up and all at once I’m gone.

The line, “So from today I’m/ travelin’ light,” comes from a Billie Holiday classic.

The background for this poem happened around 12 or 13 years ago when I had exchanged a couple of emails with a volunteer landmine deminer in the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region of Armenia who talked about losing a friend whose device that she had been trying to defuse went off. “She was there and then she wasn’t.” That image stayed with me for a very long time. I’ve done a lot of things in life but nothing compares to those people who are forced to deal with all the unexploded ordnance left behind, often decades later, due to somebody else’s war.

The United Nations estimates that there are currently as many as 100 million unexploded landmines buried around the world. Mines are designed to be difficult to locate and their clearance is costly in terms of both money and lives. It is estimated that, in 2021, more than 5,500 people were killed or maimed by landmines, most of them were civilians, half of whom were children.

To answer your question, I wasn’t expecting this sonnet to get to me as it did. I hadn’t gotten choked up when I wrote it. By the time, though, I got to, “Call out my name,” I had developed that sobbing-stutter one gets when trying to talk and not lose it at the same time. It was a very odd sensation.