Tag Archives: the dead

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.

last cricket song

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

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The dead aren’t poetic. They don’t murmur
about being leaves in a storm, the last
cricket song on the last night of summer.
Leave that bullshit to the living, who cast
one scared eyeball on the shadow and claim
it is in their image. What a deep lack
of faith. As if faith was some sort of game
you could name. It’s either raw and bareback
or not at all. You can’t pull out, just pray
that this time the crude dead will not claim you
as their own. They will, sooner or later,
but not tonight. Tonight you should obey
no one, no laws, like the dead. The one true
law that you’ll learn later, but not sooner.

war’s cure

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Illustration and art, Poetry, sonnet

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Dada'ab 1

How to understand? In dreams I’m simply
holding a child together in my arms,
swathed and bloody. Wake up. In Swahili

mzimu means ghost. They come from burnt farms,
poisoned wells, fields where the bodies went down.

Who understands the dead?: ghosts, mzimu,
souls. Go work at Kenya’s Dada’ab Town,

largest refugee camp in the world. “You
need to work,” we tell ourselves. Understand

words are a start but not an end. Orphans
and ghosts are still looking for us. War’s cure
is hard work; so find us a new grassland,
enough for all. Enough food for millions.
Enough water to let us dream once more.

largest refugee camp in the world

largest refugee camp in the world

Kenya-Dada'ab

come collector of stories

08 Friday Feb 2013

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tell me your story

tell me your story

* * *

Far, far away in big cities poets
write and write about the horrors of war.

Let me tell you: in a valley of huts
lies a body. Monsoons and grass made tar
out of him, sticks and bones. After the crows

I come, collector of stories. Green vines
covered him, lilies in his mouth. Who knows
how long he lay there; alien skylines
tell us so little. I whispered his name.

He rose, all weed. I took him by the hand
to my tent. I won’t tell what he said. Shame
should be no one’s legacy. He cried sand,
moaned dirt. War, like love, is all in the head.

Perhaps you will get it, just like the dead.

dead boys make the best dramas

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in Erotic, Illustration and art, Poetry, sonnet

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dead boys make the best drama

The boy was gorgeous in the middle hour,
being part flesh and all rot. The sexton
watched him rise up and cast away his sour
smelling funeral shroud. His cracked, swollen
limbs soon smoothed themselves out. Flesh returning
to his frame. Dead boys make the best drama
queens. Still, love is love. The sexton, stepping
out from behind a gravestone, nausea
that the living feel for the dead quickly
fading, wrapped his warm arms around the cold,
little boy; pulling his eerie beauty
close, as if love was something we could hold.
Sacred love, no matter how odd or small;
we are blessed if we find our love at all.

a dark science

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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There are two scars on the dead woman’s breasts
but when I run my finger over them
she mews, shivers and turns away. Our chests
soon touch and she pushes her need and phlegm,
a stub of a blue tongue, into my mouth.
Love should come with no strings or not at all.
When I move between her thighs, “go down south,
Moses,” I can taste on her clit the gall
of the methanol used in embalming.
There is a science to all this, I know.
A dark science. I treasure that second
when she climaxed, laughing and crying,
when the dead discovered lust once more
and our understanding of love deepened.

i’ll feed you all

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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“She’s a gumbo cooker and an alligator whipper
make a dead man jump and shout.”
Elkie Brooks, “Mojo Hannah”

 

I mixed the powdered leaves of thyme that grow
on the slopes of Levant, roasted wormwood,
greens and Dead Sea salt into a gumbo
to please you. You were hungry, understood
I was the source of your food. I called on
the dead and their honey-melon cravings.
I’ll feed you all. Eon after eon
you did not forget such pleasant drippings
between your lips. We all have rot, wearied,
endless needs. I pity you poor zombies
and all that you must endure just to feed
down on Canal Street among quiet trees.
Taste this, love, a kitchen witch, ringed, tattooed,
taught me this gumbo; the dead’s favorite food.

flush blush flame

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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You’ve heard this before. Now and then. The soul
springs up alive. Polarized eyes then blink.
Useless limbs quiver. The heart, all charcoal
and ash, resumes. Flies move off and the stink
of your green rot fades and you flush and blush
and flame. Something below your slumbering
belly stirs. Poor Lazarus was all mush-
pulp when he rose. But we are no offspring
of sky gods. Our mothers taught us better.
Insatiable. Orgasms are doorways
to all that’s divine. What sort of sinner
would turn a blind eye on this holy praise?
Lets go together, passing through that door
once more, to see all our mothers once more.

dura la polla y los fantasmas

16 Sunday Sep 2012

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Los muertos viven conmigo.

Fantasmas de vírgenes que se suicidó.

Cada persona que murió de un corazón roto.

Durante todo el día vemos películas tristes.

No porque ahora estamos tristes.

No porque nuestros corazones se sigue rotos.

Ai, una vez que estábamos solos,

y ahora somos familia.

Estamos aprendiendo a reírse de nuevo.

 

dura la polla y los fantasmas

(The dead live with me. Ghosts of virgins who committed suicide. Each soul who died from a broken heart. All day we watch sad movies. Not because we are sad. Not because our hearts are still broken. Ai, once we were all alone, and now we are family. We are learning to laugh again)