I repeat myself: ‘employable and serene’,
the remnants of a sweet life run obscene;
untrickled, -tendriled, -trailed, and –done,
this sweet life into remnants run.
Oh father, son, and holy ghost,
who fears you fears the darkness most.
Apostates beaten, pillar to post,
before the gibbering pallid host.
Milk froths in blue-black pails,
a throb of wind to paunch the sails.
Sun-coaxed diamonds from a dripping nest,
motionless horizons on the west.
Threads from inner sacs peeled away,
the island humps its kidnapped bay.
Lifted, snow-capped, venus-mounds:
déclassé villas dribble down.
With elaborate hidden civil shrug
the city pumps its civil drug:
in walls, quads, and gardens, shut,
the sunlit, diesel opiate.
Uncivil servants, classless whores
expel the ghosts of civil wars.
And round the addicts’ livid sun
the angels flutter one by one.
Queer Street’s muse begs vagrant change
from leeches scrabbling out of range.
Her swollen tongue to proselytize,
poets tinker, dodo-wise.
Valentine’s heart spurts crimson sap
upon love’s topographic map.
His pillow profiles sleeplessness
and mocks his dreamworld with a kiss.
A kiss, of lips on humid air,
where lovers drench each other’s hair.
A nightmare’s fledgling arabesque
shadowfloods the guiltless nest:
the jerk and spasm of a clownish dance;
the iron grid of circumstance.
The severed artery’s urgent leap;
the cathetered brain drips into sleep.
Whoever sighs, however veiled,
Eros’ messengers have sailed.
With profiles, documents, and tapes,
descriptive treacheries and rapes.
All manner fit, all manner foul,
the blissful, false, transported howl.
Undignified, this coupling in a grave,
undignified, that Psyche be made slave.
Fade, Sleep … in terminal miscarriage,
till Psyche sinisters her marriage.
From the hour’s blue erotic portion
and the salt-flood of the sea’s abortion.
Within the eyelid’s velvet close,
de Milo, etched with varicose,
stands in tides and broken foam,
as nude, as shy, and as alone
as Val, whose bed affords no rest:
a virgin’s hard and kid-dry breast.
The inbound waves unconch their names,
afraid to stutter out their shames.
The poisoned groin seeps liquid fire,
the heart transfixed on Eros’ wire.
Imagined clips and false constructs,
a Frankenstein mélange of loveless fucks.
The brain, unwithered and undamd,
whispers ‘tigress’, ‘hawk’, and ‘lamb’.
The neuter ground of monochrome
unprejudiced by twig or stone.
Crusaders hoof the hapless field
which Mamluks willingly do yield,
to draw and tease and beckon on
through valleys scorched a sterile blond.
Through parallel journeys, where are seen
the bright colonials stripping clean
the overladen skeletons of grass and gold
(neither so precious nor as old
as sentimental reds contend,
predicting every shiver, each convulsive end).
‘Easy does it’ in the hothouse of race,
where first or last each tremor changes place.
The euphony of Cesaire and Fanon
tunicks up the poet’s naked song,
to iridize the spider’s surgeon-eye
which blinks to freedom the neurotic fly.
Oh underside! O uncorrupted belly!
St. Stael rips off Botticelli.
Drains him to the fuseless core
till none can say which came before.
The chicked boys, the feckless girls,
decked out in marks and daubs and swirls
of blue and black and gold and green
and every bleeding zero in between.
But stuffed with ale, wine, and gin,
the poet needs his heroine.
He scours drunken through his world
and settles for a foolish girl
in whom he sees (or thinks he sees)
cerebral, blissful ecstasies,
which walk in beauty, like the night
and grow disgusting in the light,
with tongue of cotton, eyes of death,
the Fall of Rome upon her breath.
In midnight’s squalid sheltering bed
misogyny rears his sleepless head.
With skin of saffron, lizard-mottle,
it suckles courage from the bottle.
Eau d’extase or boozer’s seed,
the woman-killer’s golden mead.
The girl-fearing shade leaps up,
secures his dentures from a cup,
combs out his mane with unwashed fingers,
and in a drunken mirror lingers.
Valentine risen from the tomb,
that dozing anti-Freudian womb,
casts icy eye and colder heart
upon his godlike male part
(although, to give our Valentine his due,
a demi-god would prove more true).
With florid geste and lewd design
the dream-girls scamper, whimper, whine.
Simpered whispers softly lisp
and fog the brain with rambling mist.
Mid blacks embedded, sole white babe,
with compass, condom, astrolabe,
prefigures stellar routes of love
to strain from depths and break above
in artificial fiery milk
to be calcuttae’d into silk
which sleeve of flesh, though gently poked,
dries up its lock, if sore provoked.
When trust was capsized in the blue
and Adam found he could not chew
‘twas when his lady offered him
the taste of wisdom over quim.
Thus Val, propelled by blowhard lust,
proclaims his dust before his rust,
tho’ nymphs, filles, mademoiselles,
avoid his rancid, hothouse cell.
He says: I am the heir of false estates.
The seed I spill won’t racinate.
Each sterile thrust, each slingshot job,
however moist, remains dry-bobbed.
Wish I then children on these panting girls?
A herd of bastards flung round the world?
I’m not so rich, nor tyrant-pricked,
my future orphans to inflict
within the bellies of my demi-loves,
fair vessels unseduced by Hebrew doves.
I lack the courage to decamp
when feminine fingers dark the lamp,
nor have I spine enough to flee
when lodged between some doxy’s knees.
For if she lays the gauntlet down
then straightaway my lap is crowned
and thoughts of flight or chaste dissent
drown in the ache of sperm unspent.
Twas ever thus, and e’er shall be:
a rose so sweet is lechery.