Inveterate flatterer

If you let me, if I’d let myself

I’d mention you in every mouthful

Once, at 15, my father said; Stop talking about that girl, I think you’re obsessed!

I was, without yet acknowledging how deeply these things can go

Forget an arrow, your harnessing of me is a tattoo as inked as the one I already have

If you were a sadist you’d say; Good. Now crawl to me

I suspect I would.

Absence is a devour and every hour a little harder

It’s a tortured song locked inside my chest

Awaiting your key.

You, you, you, the bird who flies without feather

You, you, you, the permanent loan against my sanity.

In restless chamber of night, I wake feverish, imagining

Your cruel hands on me, the cull of my longing to lie

Beside you, above you, beneath you, inside you.

The funny thing is, you don’t try, you never have, it comes naturally

Like walking on hands or juggling, neither of which I ever mastered

As you master me with the flint in your eyes and the quiescence of your tongue

Sharp teeth catching against your damson lip, ragged once in a great while

I have become a collector of moments featuring you

The turn of your full cheek set against certain light, eloping into smile

I want to dose you with a spell that you’ll feel

A tenth, a quarter, a handful.

Even as you are a wild thing and I knew it then, as I know it now

A creature who enjoys the pin cushion of being desired

Each gentle intrusion bringing a little fresh blood

Painless for you

A hammer in my heart.

Underwing, in indigo darkness I envelop

My unspoken entreaty and braid it into my hair

With every twist, pulling tighter, for my darling, wishing is

Often pain.

Advertisement

Ode to the antipoet

I told the cheongsam wearing beauty

You are very kind

But I’m not sure there is such a thing

As humility

When our world is made of capital

For only recently

I heard a conversation

On the end of poetry 

The deceivers, sharp, pointed folk

Trussed in their certainty

Poetry was neither vocation nor career

But some beast of the very idle

Something retired people and students dabbled in 

Not a grown up or grown down job but

Proof of latter life impressionist indolence

Yet, like land auctioned off and trees torn down 

We cannot know of the beauty once standing

Without the witness of a scribe

For more roads without direction we take, employing compass

Without translation, our journey remains an enigma

Like redheads, freckles and those left-handed

Doomed to scorn and ostracized days

They paint the world with much needed alternatives

As poets write out everything within us we couldn’t see, lending words to universal feeling

Yet, relegated by the long tongue of capitalist decree

Those who configure feelings shall never be 

The vaunted or the high priest, followed in obedience

It is our nature to ridicule what we do not understand

Absurd yet with mis-hap sense, justifying how we turned out

No choice, no desire for question

Some grow up longing to be dentists, chartered accountants, bankers, zoo keepers

And those of us who from earliest moment

Wrote what others dismissed or feared to touch

Carry a strange torch

Maybe the value is not always clear

Surely easier to pour scorn upon, the role of poet 

Than to give thanks

We have not in our collective greed

Forgotten the art of being

When frail turn reminds us

Being human is more

Than cast off rind

But the potency of citrus

In a land that had never before known

Tropical fruit