October Kink

OCTOBERAL

October 6

Dark creeps slowly back like a tide
edging up shores of dawn and dusk.
And like a spirit charmed out from
his tree, it waves a plush spell
through the air, half fey, half of
some darker lucency, like the pale
moon of this full Octoberal.
Today we’re off to celebrate
our marriage-day with a
trip to look through old stuff shops
in Melbourne and then
Titusville, and then head
back this way finishing
off with dinner at our favorite
Coq au Vin: Past-due
remittance for the hard work
of this rough year with all
its losses great and small
throughout, for all the sweat
and weariness, for the headaches
and backaches and disenchanting
worried bowels. Yesterday we got
the next hard news -- my in-laws
put their old loved cat down. BJ
had so many survivals
that we all thought he’d just keep
going on; who were we kidding?
My wife bought a sympathy card
that we both wrote in -- what a good
kitty, what a good full life he had,
-- We’ll stick it in the mail before
we hit the road. Last night
I waited up for our own
black cat to show up for dinner,
even walking down dark
moonlit Ninth Avenue to softly
call her home. At last she showed up
on the porch just as I was giving
up on her for the night, those big
eyes peering right at me from the
window panes in the door.
She greeted me as I walked out
with a score of low soft mews --
scolding me or giving thanks,
who knows? I sat down next to
her with food, stroking her sleek
black back awhile, leaning close
to hear her purr -- oh what a soft
far sea inside that sweet drone --
Then just let her eat while
the moony night pushed close
and closer in, the long summer now over,
mixed days of heat and less ahead,
along with more hard work, more
worries, more losses for sure. I
gave thanks for that moment,
just to sit there with that stray
mama cat who sired the two
fat males we also feed; and it
seemed a whole life was held
together in that single moment.
She finished her food and
looked at me with those full
gold eyes, searching for
some unsayable link in our ritual
before leaving me sitting there
alone with all the night still there,
the moon near full, lamping
pale blue across the yard’s hard black,
a light both old and dancing
over all we cusp through loss and lack.



According to the I Ching, reality is composed from two great wheels -- the Outer or Primal World arrangement of seasons and things as they have been from the beginning, and an Inner World of kin and history. The wheels spin in alternate rotations, so that there is always a secret meaning to the face of things. “To understand fully,” Richard Wilhelm writes in his commentary, “one must always visualize the Inner World arrangement as transparent, with the Primal Arrangement shining through it.” Each wheel has the same trigrams assigned to cardinal points, but they are not in the same order. “Thus when we come to the trigram Li ((The Clinging Fire, in the position looking south)), we come at the same time to the ruler Ch’ien, who governs with his face turned toward the south.”

Always the orders are one, yet kinked a notch the other way; identical with a difference. Must one have a skewed vision to see things dead on?

***

So my mystery’s confluence with history is kinky; it sport a well of a wound of a womb of a tomb: Two readings, for better or ill: Fair’s foul, foul’s fair, and never will I quite again requite myself inside Her blue underwear, though I try, though I try.

Lacan identifies the formation of the libido around a fear of castration, which I suppose for girls would be a fear of being devoured by the mother. (Read back to yesterday’s foray into Lamia.) The position of heaven at our history’s source is maintained in the Inner World by a jackal with bloody jaws:

***

“The description of the stages ((up to the age of 3 or 4)) which go to form the libido, must not be referred to some natural process of pseudo-maturation, which always remains opaque. The stages are organized around the fear of castration. The copulatory fact of the introduction of sexuality is traumatizing -- this is a snag of some size -- and it has an organizing function for development.

“The fear of castration is like a threat that perforates all the stages of development. It orients the relations that are anterior to its actual appearance -- weaning, toilet training, etc. It crystallizes each of these moments in a dialectic that has at its center a bad encounter ...

“The central bad encounter is at the level of the sexual. This does not mean that the stages assume a sexual taint that is diffused on the basis of the fear of castration. On the contrary, it is because this empathy is not produced that one speaks of trauma and primal scene.”

-- Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis




What a garden grows around the trauma of that primal scene, welling blood turned ambrosial, swoony and uncoagulate, a booze no glass can empty. Star that omphalos my daemon kink, his kick powered by all the dark delivers ...


KINK

October 4

If the sexual is
our secret text,
then the kick we get
from kink is the
hidden hex which
magicks our sweet losses
into sourer surer lines,
There’s a secret meat
we ache to eat
that we can only
steal from steel
verbotens and then
only oh so glancingly,
not truly, never quite
for real, and then
not even more
than once in fancy.
Just a whip, a dip
in darkling rectums,
not a dive; just
the faintest whiff
of the menacing animal
whose black-furred
cock we glove and shoe
and closet in closed
bedrooms. Kink is always
more than heaven's
love affords, a slap-
ass raunchy raid
across the tracks
no one must know
about, its forays
always under heated
pressure, up the
tight-pressed tits
of rude taboo
into a profane veld
of pearl necklaces
and golden showers,
the infant glee of
pantymost perverse
oh only for a night,
an hour, a well-jaunt
concluded long
before first light.
Maybe kink does
come from history --
wounds we come
to romance into wombs,
the pederast
become a sire,
the absent mother
the ghostly hue
of blue stockings
and black garters,
all that infernal
50’s equipage stolen
from yer mama’s drawers
and warn before the
mirror, obsessional
and replete and ornate,
housing deep within
such gilt a chewed
and broken knuckle.
Surely kink has
a bruised catalogue
of hymeneal
assaults -- titfuck,
reverse cowgirl,
suckoff, anal,
footjob, DP:
Sordid jacks of
nastiness no good
boy or girl would
dream of playing
once their potty
training was complete.
But nightmares have
great hooves -- there’s
gold in them thar ills --
and kink delivers
so wild a kick
against safe worlds
that none are truly
safe, thank God,
except the holy
and the dead.
And I wouldn’t
count those
rollers out, because
kink is the
literal visceral
genital gospel
which has no pages
we can see, much
less read or believe
or not, being
written from the
inside view which
finds truth always
a step off into
the margins of
all we think we know--
brute and unrefutable
stuff, even for the Lord.
In the sidhe of
kink foul’s fair and
and fairest are
fouled panties, and
what sustains are
whipcrack kisses
of a welting sort
of pleasure, pinched
nipples weaning
a black sea’s measure
where a slapped-ass
moon rises fully
into view. Kink
maps infernal
regions of bad
leisure which only
falling angels can
enjoy, wings burning
down through
the babylonian ‘burbs
of hearts broke
into sweetmeat
long ago. No place
I would ever care to
live in -- thank God
His Outer Heaven
keeps me round --
but the occasional
jaunt has merit
to the mystery I
sing, a dip in that
inkwell which keeps
this pen flowing
like a tongue up
through some
noir nympholet’s
widespread cheeks.
Naughty nasty
& fraught with
sin, a-reek with
just enough
sweet-sour sulphuring
to drop kink’s
anchor down
adrift bland days
between the life
and its long dying.
Kink tethers me
to a dark seafloor
inside my mother,
turning all the bells
outside into wordy
balls that smoulder,
slapping happy
against a nightmare’s
cheeks as the siren
squeaks and squeals
in bottomless pleasure,
delighted to hear
me singing loud and blue
our naughty nasty
birthday song,
shameless and forever true.





BLUE BONE BRIDGE

2002

he strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)

— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell

When I was 5 my mother took me
to a matinee of “Puss And Boots.”
Two images forever twined in my mind:
in the first, a terrible night thunderstorm
caused a tree to fall on the hero in
an overloud, horrific crash.
In the second a boy jumped
bare-assed into a smiling summer pond.
Terror from the first scene leapt up
in a strange howl, made huge and
loud by the weight of that savage trunk;
a warm delight of the second scene
to lathe my fear in a rich white goo.
On many nights thereafter I’d wake
from nightmares of crashing thunder,
only to press my face to the pillow
and watch myself jump into
warm waters to save a girl.
For all the simple carefree days
which composed my early years—
nurtured and loved by my parents,
safe in suburban neighborhoods—
that dark sweet imagining
kept seizing me like a claw up
from the floor which flicked
me in a pool.
My friend and I built monster
models—Creature From The
Black Lagoon, Dracula, The
Forgotten Prisoner—the two of
us in thrall with the dripping
caverns and rotted cells of
revenants and skeletons.
I found in actual woods
near home and school
a dark sexual joy of
peeking and revealing,
play-acting Mommy and
Daddy not as I knew
but thrilled to guess.
As a child I only guessed at
that blue bone-latticed
land, walking as I did in
relative safety, knowing I
was but a hand away from
some parent’s hand.
Far different was the night
which called me from home into
the tropic lush of my 14th year:
bolder and colder that moon,
wild and intoxicate,
sexual with swollen glands
and aching fingers.
Growing up meant straying
far into that insatiable wood;
a self’s composed from paths
far from home and God.
The musk of crushed oranges
seared up from the rot of ruin
which came on a stormy night
much longer ago, when my God
decreed I craft these craven
images from what I bleed
and perilously need.
How I bandage myself up
from that horrid land
and link back—to the living again
and to a loving hand—is
a complicate return
to a forest night
where a thunder merges
with all the joys down under.


TALK DIRTY TO ME

2004

Talk dirty to me barks the sea
As I amble down the naked
Shoreline of a prayer. Shake it,
Shake it like a horny Pope down
Under. Angelic apes stand in
The wash stroking huge erections
& mouthing every name of God.
When old men enter puberty
It’s a rude uproar: Our lust is
Brown-eye ugly to those oiled girls
Sunning for young kings & hard hooved
Rings of fire. I’ve stopped caring for
Good press -- It’s time now to get down.
Watch me lower my shorts down to
This ankling tide -- I’ve seas to screw!






SEA-WITCHERY

Halloween 2004

And what of the sea-witch,
my thousand-year bride?
She was once the nun
who prayed matins
like a shore but I
lured her to the dark
waters with the music
of the tide between
these protean hips,
ensnaring her white
calves with a bony laugh
& dragging her all the
way out and down. I
had my way with her
but good, the envy
of every narwhal bull
and deep-diving
spermacetti ram.
And then I lost her in
that keep, & become
an exile of love’s spleen
on a hard-smashing shore
of basalt ruins, searching
every wave for a trace
of her seem amid the
drifting dozing
manes of low sea-grass.
I know she’s there
but I’ve lost the way
I used to see her,
or she has simply
wearied of my eyes
and now fins the
arteries of a darker,
deeper man than
I have balls to go.
The news each day
washes in the
battered corpses
of her undinal ways,
naked cyanotic sailors
with still-red lips
pursed to kiss what
you keep drawing
5 more fathoms down.
Look at all the pumpkins
we carve recalling your
raw pudenda’s ire.
And oh the darkened
forest spreading round
the heart of he
who finds you nightly,
black stumps creaking
in a cold autumn
night’s breeze, a
bonier sound knocking
from your last soiree
into the noirish
tableaux of bars
and cars you dreamed.
I should have rid my
loins of this thirst
for you so many lives
ago -- divorced the
demiurge, renounced
the sea, bled white
my salt iniquities:
Yet this muse of
darkness I call my
own, albeit for
bitter and perverse,
the moony incandescence
inside my every wave’s
dying sigh. I am here
for her declision
on shores of nascent
white pages gleaming
white as bone. Her
name is Kirsteen M’Vurich
and she is that much
further out, sprawled
on a bed of chorda filum,
staring in the silver mirror
in which she sees me
in its gleam. I can hear
a high and ghastly laughter
beyond the booming stones,
a twittering of teeth
that picks the pelvis clean
and blots its lips with foam.