Wet Dream

-- Sigmund Freud from “The Transformation of Puberty,” in The Contributions to the Theory of Sex:

“Aside from the fact only the discharge of the sexual substance can normally put an end to the sexual excitement, there are other essential facts which can bring the sexual tension into relation with the sexual products. In a state of continence, the sexual apparatus is wont to disburden of all the sexual substance nocturnally through pleasurable dream hallucinations of a sexual act; this discharge appears sporadically, but not at entirely irregular periods.

“The following interpretation of this process -- the nocturnal pollution -- can hardly be rejected, viz., that the sexual tension which brings about a substance for the sexual act by the short hallucinatory road is a function of the accumulated semen in the reservoirs for the sexual products.

“Experiences with the exhaustibility of the sexual mechanism speak for the same thing, that where there is no stock of semen, it is not only impossible to accomplish the sexual act, but there is also a lack of excitability in the erogenous zones, so that their appropriate excitation cannot evoke any pleasure. We, thus, discover incidentally that a certain amount of sexual tension is alone necessary for the excitability of the erogenous zones.”

***

WET DREAM

Nov. 4

There is brain and mind,
bordered by Your
salt-sloshed shore, a
span’s pale reach which
turns water into wine,
a wave into a woman’s
collapse welcoming all
doors. History and
mystery are the
broken knuckles of
one sooth, one half
the fact, the other
its blue didact,
the heart of the
matter whole only
when both sears
congeal. So when I
talk of sex in this
diving poem, I am both
Freud and Jung,
the emphatic genital
conjoined with vatic
oomph. The genital
then is the genitive
thrall of the mereman’s
spell which charms
the sea to walk
on land, alluring salt
heresies no science
of our age can
proscribe enough against,
much less cure or
quell. You were and
are that sap which gathers
in my testicles like
a moon-tide rousing toward
a shore in a wave of
swelling swart desires,
a throng of fish-tailed
oms fraught in the wake’s
shadow in my lucent
mind, releasing from
a self-locked closet
the naiad, spooring
spree -- bouncing boobs
and bent-down bottoms
pleasing helterskelter
a charge of molten flavor.
They turn my mind into
some chthonic forge
that’s desperate to
plunge in water, dispelling
all the horsemen in
a charge and spasm
of spitting white foam
inside the clenching blue.
A species trope
of boy goos girl
in ten thousand
phantommed ways,
so hardwired in
my skull’s sweet loins
that no partner’s
even needed,
not even a real prick.
Observe the boy-man’s
bed at night where
he tosses on his
piling semen’s coals,
his dream speared
through by a fish-woman’s
blue-eyed gaze up from
a gale-fraught wake.
She cries to him
and sings his seed,
naming with a parted
full-lipped sigh his
entire genealogy
past and forward of
that roasting bed.
He twists and rolls
and clenches nothing’s
thighs; and then
shouts the name of
love below, far out the
delves of a wet dream’s
undertow. Semen
soaks the sheets
in salt exult; he smiles
deep in sleep and
ebbs back down,
contented and free
at last inside the womb
he lost. Come morning
he finds damp stickiness
below, and wonders
what the hell: But by
then You’ve fully disappeared,
grandfather, descended
all the way down to
that sea bed where
the ur-man’s vault of
sex is found, a chest of
rapt engendering pleasures
all red in front and blue
behind, choiring hosannahs
to tumescence to a
mind always hot to trot.
That boy is filling his
own box too, hidden
deep in his wild closet,
laying in the sights
and sounds of fresh
conquests -- bra-strap
snapping, a smile
in a blacklit room,
the slish of a fully
cunted slick midfinger --
booty for that box
and Yours, revered
so deeply there’s something
almost priestly in my
remembrance,
intoning every dirty
deed to put the writ
on git-r-done.
Reverence and awe
to You , jizz father,
chief herdsman of the
tribe who rides the
fishtailed horse forever
toward more naked
shores. May your ache
and angst be measured
full and fuller as I write,
a wave grown monstrous
in its sheer towering desire,
sloping up a mile of
bluegreen glassy steel:
So be your benediction
at the ends of all desire,
an impossibly heightened
ire in direct proportion
to the sea flowed underground,
firing up a phallus
into stone & stretching
past all length in full remittance
of Your name: With aching
balls a big as cathedral
bells & feeling the hard
tug on the rope by
Your ancient giant hands.
You brought me to this
stellar blinding clangorous
peak in fulfillment, alas,
of just half the story, my
song as that catapult
which was enginned to
hurl seed high and hard
and cruel and greedy,
up and out from
those archaic depths
which spat the moon
skyward. We followed,
You know, up from a wave’s
collapse of Venusian thrall,
to walk on down strange
pale shores full-lamped
by moon indigo. This pen
itself is inked in that
dark dew that's milked
from the brains of whales,
an ambergris of such
fragrant truth a man
seeks it everywhere his
mother leaves a silken
shadow, like moonlight
over the marges of a
wet dream. A mere
glimmer of that soak
is enough to bid me
launch all boats
with harpoons at full
readiness, white paper
like a dreaming surge
which I know will
disclose the prey
I seek, if I write
down the page far
enough, if I’ve got
the balls to wait
for Your breech
and spume. Just
a flash of pale thigh
and its heave ho
my boys! the stillness
galed by flung harpoons
and the whack whack
whack of a predator’s
joy, penetrating so much
flesh to get to the
gorgeous beating heart
at center, with all
its sacred pleasure
yielding with a cry
I ... I ...
The dream which
possessed this hand
has spasmed down
to here -- oh well.
Time to get this
day to shore,
feed the cats &
wake the wife,
clean the garage
& watch some
football games perhaps
with all the windows
of this house wide
open to a breezy
autumn day. The
cheerleaders smile
and jump with
athletic legs parted
wide: they never
quite come down
you know, not as
long as my grandfather
rides the sea
between the tides.




SUBDUCTION
WITH MAZOLA

2005

I heard about Mazola parties
when I was 14 and so full of
pent sperm that it leaked
from every pore and plane
of my awakening, unseemly
gouts that were physical
and mental and spiritual
to boot. A kid who was the
younger brother of a girl I
ached for would smoke
Marlboros together at the
7-11 across from our high
school in Winter Haven
before school began,
and he would tell me
about fucking his hippie
girlfriend every afternoon
in her mother’s house
while the mother was
at work, hours of naked
sweaty nookie as the
Florida sun shattered
the world with its
brute sexual hammer,
leaving behind a
molten afternoon
of sweat and spunk and
spunk. (All the fun
I didn’t have went on
in someone’s mother’s
house, there never
were any Daddies in
our subdivisions)
Then he’d allude to
gatherings of 10 or 12
freaks at some party
house deep inside
the groves; well after
midnight, having smoked
a bunch of pot and
drunk too much Boone’s
Farm, a sheet of
visqueen would be laid
over the living room carpet
and several bottles of
Mazola Oil poured
out. And then the
lights went out, the
Led Zepplin cranked
lout and everyone
got naked and commenced
the wildest fucking in
the world, slipping
and sliding and careening
in the heated dark,
cramming into every orifice
a 14 year old could dream.
I believed every word of
that fool’s fairy tale;
how could I not?
The wash of jism
sloshing in my skull
was so sugared and salted
by the story that no
amount back-home diddling
could resolve or sum
the images I saw, there in
my lonely lights-out
bedroom room of my
mother’s so-dark house
in a bare subdivision
burning at the far shore
of the Sixties on the
edge of a huge orange
grove that was being
savaged down for more
suburban mothers and
their selfish noxious brood.
Actually, it wasn’t the
girls I thought of -- it was
too hard to imagine even just
one naked girl back then,
so fragmentary and nixed
my pubescent moments
trying to get one so --
But that Mazola in my
diddling mind was
like oil poured by gods,
slick to the point of
frictionless glissade,
almost erasing the actual
interfascia of palm and
prick, imagined boobs
and butts, my
phantom cock inside
the lubricent grooves
of every cheerleader
and prom queen I
encountered there.
The Mazola and the collective
augment it greased
made me dervish-mad
with relish, my ears
howling with imagined
Yesses and Omigods,
a devil’s congregation
choiring black sins in
equal volume to the voices
in those holy roller churches
my mother always dragged
us to, with their orgiastic
tongues of holiness & the
fire-rolling waves of
faux-angelic feeling.
As one tectonic plate shoves
under another, so my sex
entered its subduction zone,
the mass of my inchoate
desire shoved down hard
by guilt and fear, down
under the mighty continent
adulthood in its world-
wide wounds deemed
necessary and moot
and good. It was 1971,
the harrows of the ‘60s
playing out in bum trips
and unzippered license,
Black Sabbath ringing in
the bleeding ears of Woodstock,
the nuclear arsenals of
the United States and Russia
so massed and triggered
and itching as to perch the
world ten feet from its
final falls. Just when my
every sense was shouting
out a puberty of the soul,
peeled and naked like
orange sections, supple,
sweet and poised to proffer
to an infinitely growing thirst --
just then that frightening
world was shoving every
sense of wonder down
and hard, under
the rigor of God’s fraught
and static heaven,
so perfect and chaste
and massive in its words,
it angelic righteousness
whitening the fruit, withering
it eternally. Ah but how
the wheels of my plunging
libido were greased by
dreams of Mazola sex,
making even sublimation
a sordidly blessed slick affair. --
Even as my eyes shut tight
and my lips prayed Get
Behind Me Satan did
my darker self finally
get around to unhook
the black bra of
that nightside world,
flinging it up into
the boughs of a
fruit tree fraught
with bursting fruit.
Even miles down from any
hope of actual sex did
pent nipples squirt in
my mouth the milk of
fire and foam, did my
aroused and hardened
heart slide in and out
the orifaces of a horde
who were darkly
praising that God too,
praying perhaps for a
dying world with ocean
gouts of juice and
magmatic iron spew.
And at this 5 a.m. with
a hard long day of work
ahead; with termites
swarming upstairs &
money tight & my wife
despairing of her business
& not much hope for
nookie in the view, not
for miles and miles,
though desire’s hot as
the coming summer
sun; At at this black hour
I thank that hermaneut
who told me not his
story but the myth
which still belongs
to the Horned
One. There outside
a 7-11 33 years ago
just before the first
bell of the next school day
I received the host
and blood from a kid
who was all mouth.
I was a fool but
the Mazola thus got spilled,
making every subduction
since a crime half God’s,
half mine; a delight thus, too.
The mountain of verse
which towers here, with all
its engorged enraging
cowled and brooding stone,
is lifted up to God because
I’m still going down and
round my wheels in
a lube meant
for frying fish fillets.
Bless its mess, O Lord,
the gleaming nakedness
of all I’ve left to say.
Eden is still shining in
the goop and the dark,
“Whole Lotta Love” on the
stereo and the body bags
flying back from Vietnam
like black angels &
the pulse of puberty
fisting hard below.
It grows wild here
over all that, like a
savage garden, its
milky penumbra
shadowing our
cat in the window of
this next great
soon dawning day
and everything’s perfect,
glistening, pent, ready
again to douse the
lights and get down again.





If you bring out what is inside you,
what you bring out will save you.
If you fail to bring out what is inside you,
What you fail to bring out will destroy you.

The Gospel of St. Thomas

THE WOMAN IN THE
POLKA DOT DRESS

2004

Alchemical work had to hurt
(boil, sever , skin, dessicate,
putrefy, suffocate, drown, etc.)
natural nature in order to
free animated nature. As soon
as psyche enter into consideration,
the only-natural is not enough.

— James Hillman,
Dream and Underworld

Fall 1986: A bad season of
collapsing walls. My last band
had folded wings that summer.
My guitar was frozen in
its case, a stone thing
falling through blue plush
into a well of banshee
booze, hauling me down
a tide with those fingers
of big night music gripped,
like stone, around round
my ankle. I had tried
swearing off the booze
but going it alone I hadn’t
a clue what to mend or
forgive or give back. And so
I found myself out again
in that old the zombie zone,
suited up with a
a lunar-cold vengeance.
Real things fell on
me from arch-angelic
aeries, like
the massive oak
I discovered
on top of my garage
apartment after work
one day, the walls of
my tiny cheap room
buckled out. I retrieved
journals and guitar
and natty slax and got
the hell on outta there,
setting up in a tiny
room in my mother’s
house. That was when
I started writing down
the malaise, even
as I headed full force into
it. I made a weak
(inept, too wounded)
attempt to love a German
exchange student
named Magritte but
the clearer motions it
demanded — stability,
fidelity, sacrifice —
kept getting lost in
the murk of tequila.
One night I called
her to make plans
for dinner and a
Pat Matheny concert,
and found myself
after ringing off
walking right out
the door, engorged
with that cactus gestalt.
Long hours later screwed
to a barstool in
my favorite water
hole, the blackout man
crept from his
grave, that barking
hell-bent satyr equal
parts fang and cock.
Followed a woman
back to a house
where someone had
died recently —
there were piles of
bills on a table, ashtrays
of a ghost
overflowing like
sewers, the smell
of oatmeal cookies
and piss. In my journal
the next day, I wrote
“heights of sex around
2:30 and 6 a.m., yes,
but the falloff was
meteoric” — the blisses
of that season seemed
carved not from waves
but their riptide. The
next night — the one
before my date
with Magritte — I
ended up at Fern Park
Station drinking the
night away to the
sound of a bad big
hair metal band
& Kim the topless
dancer invited me
back to her apartment
for more of the same
though blacker in in
is blare. Bare overhead
bulb & Van Halen
squealing on a table
radio as we did shots
& drank beer. After
I fucked her on the couch
(from behind, hard,
like a wolf), she sighed
and said “I have always
hated you” softly
in my ear. The next
day I called in sick
and shook Kim awake
to drive me back to my car,
the late morning
overheated and
shriekingly bright,
all knife and no ocean.
I was 29 and falling
down the oubliette of
my old dream of
love’s billowy perfection,
refusing to let go
down those gripless walls.
Back in that room
in my mother’s house
I slept fitfully for the
afternoon, making coffee
at 4 p.m. and casting
an I Ching oracle. —
The Abysmal Doubled,
like snake-eyes formed
from six faces of two
coins, two hexagrams of
drowning stacked on
each other, auguring
the dangers I swam
without and within.
It offered the image
of a melancholy heart
going down in freezing
brine, a place shared
by the moon, thieves,
wisdom and darkness.
“Surrender is the
only escape,” it whispered
through the hungover
creaks and folds of
the afternoon. Ah
but what to surrender
and how to let it go?
What of the dream
I had in that season
of the purely curved
woman in a black and
white polka dot dress,
walking up to the
stage where I stood
trading licks with ZZ Top.
Her breasts hips and
ass waving like a tide
toward me, her eyes
so hot on mine
the way I thought
every woman I ever
desired looked at me,
a feminine veneer
for a greater ocean
behind, her kiss
which came later
absolving every
abyss I now swam
through. She took
me to her bed of beds
on some island
of sweet delight,
fucking me every
way I came,
sighing up from
that billowy descent
how she loved me
utterly — udderly,
lutely, resolutely,
undulantly, you
weave all the sounds
of love’s pious assent —
and yet the dream
was striated with
my late and fallen
ennui, and I doubted
her words though
I knew they were true.
And then I sensed
she would be gone
and forever hence
with me: “The eternal
moment” I wrote
in my journal. Such
was my appetite
for her, for you,
my bittersweet
ocean’s absentia,
my dark-blue drawing
wave, my hunger
which all the
bars and beds
could never sate.
The Florida of that
season now
18 years ago was
in every appearance
a nightmare of
overbright streets,
the necropolitic
spookiness of
all that suburbia
just a false front
for the land I
was dying in, eternal
night inside a
brilliance. Reagan
was in his second term,
the Chicago Bears
were mauling the NFL
and rock n roll
was a glitter in the
eye of the pax MTV.
I closed my journal,
cracked a beer and
toasted that bad age
which molted
into this one. Later
with Magritte at the
Pat Matheny concert
I heard the best score
yet for my love —
a long dark pulsing
rendition of the bossa
nova jazz soiree
“Are You Going With
Me,” watching Magritte
pull as far away from
me in her seat to
watch the band. I
loved that music most
when I watched her
face drift off toward
it, the woman lost in
the tide and me trying
to wade in after. After
the concert Margritte
wouldn’t talk to me
and I dumped her
at her car to head
back out into the night
which is like this
wild witch’s smile,
all tongue and razored
teeth, a pink wet
gullet which swallowed
me as I hit the bars
guzzling Buds and
shots of Rumpleminz.
In that darkling
scree the ache delivered
me to Laurie, an
exfuck who I hadn’t
seen in three years,
now fatter and older
and drunker from all
the ways her love of love
had abused her. I
followed her back
to her apartment (in
a complex attached
by the root to the
whole grim archipelago)
& she let me have
my way with her body
every way I wished
though we couldn’t
stand to look each
other in the eye. We
fucked the rest of
the night and half
the morning, our
pudendas jabbering
like unearthed skulls:
that curtained
room was torn from
some inmate’s
page where night
after night sharks
have had their way
with her, tearing
and plunging and feasting
in slow balletic clouds
of blood. She was
the girl I never got to fuck
inside all the ones
I had, a woman inside
my own self-
ravaged psyche.
I got the hell on outta
there late that afternoon,
coming home in a
fucked out hungover
bruise to find a message
to call Magritte. She
apologized for her anger
at me and asked if we
could meet that night
and make up, maybe
proceed. But how could
I even presume to try
playing love by its rules?
I said sure and headed
out to drink. Falling
thus I finally let go
of whatever hold love
had on me, the wounds
I nursed for all those
woman who had left
me for good, shredding
every guise and gout
of purer feeling to
get down to where
the woman in the
polka dotted dress
resides and queens.
In my cups that night
I drank to dregs
like a drowning man
holding on to the
anchor of his farewell,
all the way down
to that ruined city
where she dreams.
And then I lost
the queen herself,
the one so founded
and floundered in
the marketing of
a metaphor — accepting
at last that the
dream was only
that, pure seem
and puerile gleam.
And then I really
hit the bars, going
three months of
nightly blackout
drinking, lurking
at the bottom of
a sea with the
rest of the drowned
sailors, arms
wrapped tight
around the coral
bones we dreamed.
That was the brine
in which you were
pickled, never
to return to haunt
day worlds again.
The woman in the
polka dot dress
is that booze which
Bryan Ferry sang
about in that old
Roxy Music anthem,
“The Thrill of It All”—
that pure whiskey
poured into a tight
and nippled dress,
an anthem of desire
which I sang with
all my heart marching
out every door.
The death of every
dream is horrible,
a gripless slide down
all the names for hell.
My dreams from that
time are florid
with descriptions
of infernal gloom,
of vampires with my
face who ache
to die but can’t,
vultures preening
on the moon, carnival-
like rides down
sulphur chasms
beneath the blackest
coldest heart.
My love was torn
by desire’s devil
tongs in one long
whiskey draught:
Sundered till only
my lips remained, still
pursed and ejacualate
of her exalt sheen.
Poor fool. That
season crashed
and burned me
me now nearly
15 years ago. It’s
5 a.m. now on
this second day
of writing this
poem, heaping
so many lines
lines on the ache
I still feel recalling
that awful time. I sit
on my pure white
writing chair in
the house I married
and mortgaged
every dream to
remain in: it’s
a coolish morning
in November and
so much outside
is the same —
a second-term
Bush repeating the
arch Reagan chill, the
Steelers whupping
the NFL’s unbeatable
best, and E! Television
parading the
smiles of hotties in tight
dresses, eclipsing
the shine of blood
everywhere on
Iraqi streets. And
me hurling all this
ink in measure to
a feeling that harpoons
me still when I
recall that woman
in the polka dotted
dress whom I
always wanted and
never met. That image
is like an olive
at the bottom of
my worst infernal
drink. And yet,
today it seems I got to
you at last in her,
that curvy ikon
of those nights in
wild absentia: Or,
to scratch deeper,
perhaps I reach
you best recalling
those worst nights,
my lines sliding
down a time most
alien and strange
and wild. Dare I say
I’m more alive now
in the real work
of daily love for
having lost you
utterly on nights
so long ago? Or
is it that by naming them
the demons drop their
tines and go to work
for us, the woman
in the polka dotted dress
sashayed up close
to this banging stage
where I’m still trading
licks with fire,
translating for her
your own blueblack desire.




YANG TANG

June 2000

I’m taking all
of that long
cockslickened
sickening howl
that hammered
me flat fifteen
years ago for
not singing
capably of it
& bringing it
back up through
a mind now
layered with
years of study
& sobriety
& marriage &
work: Strangely
all of that
dry denial
produced this
ocean soak
of a poem,
either through
gestation
or some
ultimate
sublimation: Am
I free or
strong or
denied enough
now to sing
its tragic,
Attic verses?
This work
predicates upon
an utter
stability which
crumbles when
I resent its walls
and necessarily
dry kisses: Then
what? I have
chosen to
live in the
cage with the
beast I call
my own: I
drink now but
don’t get drunk:
I forage among
pretties but
don’t swallow &
all the while
heap huge old
logs of the
past on this
great fire of
love I call work:
Powerful summer
summons these
days like a
babydoc’s
wakening slap
of the ass: Pure
nights humid
and humming
& each day
hurling a wash
of longing at
the sun: The
clouds build
early yesterday
as I mowed the
lawn loving
pussy washes of
sweat all over
my body: O I
was working hard
& in slick
sloshy dunks and
licks of funky
reverie, cupping
bottoms &
sperming up
twat: I’m glistening
& sweating out
in that day
feeling the heat
within the
principle of
building storms,
the lover’s eyes
closed as the
heart treks
toward a burning
cusp high in
the loins building
& building
to that taut
bowstring altar
when all of
creation’s poised
to hurl joy
deep into the
welcoming warmth
& then die:
Grass-blades
long and slender
in the fulsome
growth of early
summer accepting
the mower’s scythe
like some glad
principle of growth:
Sun dressed &
undressed in the
motions of cloud
burning like
all hell & then
hiding in some
fat happy low
& fast cloud
& everything
in that moment
stilled to a
cottony ripe
silence of cool
shade before
flipping wildly
free juiced &
hot & pleading
the next plunge:
All’s green &
stout & aching
for sun and
storm, erect,
proud, hungering,
all of my
yang gleaming
& glistening on
the long stalks
of the earth’s
male pride:
Storms filling
the entire
Western sky, one
great spread of
an angel’s wings
& many huge
cumulus massed
silver and blue
and empurpled
at their ballsy
roots: All of
that denied us
in the small
earth-bound
gambits of our
human falls:
The old rock
dreams are up
there flung
wide in that
storm &
I’m down here
with mortal
and hopefully
moral enough
need & failings:
Driving through
Mount Plymouth
& Sorrento with
my wife to visit
her parents,
frail accommodations
at the edge of
a wild tropic
waste, lined
with cracker
homesteads where
there isn’t much
to make & less to gain
& hoodoo churches
with hand-painted
gestures of
eternal Lotto:
after those towns
miles of
sun-wretched scrub,
trailers and horsefarms
& torpid drear
cows over which
hawks and
vultures soar
patiently: Into
Sanford, a
sudden blare
of construction
close to I-4,
the next Lake
Mary, industrial
& commercial &
high-end residential
buildings all beetling
up out of nowhere
like a cancer or
a boom: Into
Sanford’s lazy
sprawl, a po’
town stayed po’,
shacks up on
pilings & rusting
cars parked on
the street &
strip malls with
check cashing
and title loan
outfits & 99 Cent
retail outlets &
community outreach
centers (family
planning, welfare,
temp agencies) &
a bright blue
Blockbuster filled
with the latest
releases of
Hollywood dreams,
all for rent: There’s
a song for this
Florida, a drone
like cicadas by
a river which
carries the mud
& shit & sediment
of all Appalachian
children down to
the empty arms
of the sea: Call it
what you will,
there’s a dark
threnody inside
the ball bluster
of Florida’s summer,
greater and more
vicious than
anything we try
to lift against it—
the song of
tidal addictions
& generation
after generation
of wrecked hopes,
an insecurity
axiomatic as birth
into the wrong
color, the wrong
trailer, the wrong
America: We drive
through all that
weaving round
porcine blueblack
Cadillacs in which
frighteningly
ancient mariners
ease on down
the last of their
roads & rednecks
in pickups with
tires taller than
their pout & Lexus
SUVs bearing
the new suburban
caste which eventually
consumes all &
the odd old Pinto
spluttering oil fumes
bearing Mexicans
heading to destinations
I can’t even dream:
All raw ages of
the spirit are
puny in the
wash of this
ocean we paddle
called our life:
And words are
such a poor
wrecked
& unanchored
doublewide
trailer squatting
on the edges of
what’s terribly
fulsomely
wretchedly
heartbreakingly
there:
After dinner
I pardon myself
to walk around
the lake their
house faces: At
dusk I walk
past three
hundred
thousand
dollar houses
preternaturally
still, enclosed
only as money
can, robbing the
day of its
vital ebb: I
felt like
I was walking
a boneyard of
a necropolis,
everything so
monied & so
O what words
do you hurl
now at the
wild, you old
old old master:
Whose house
now waits for
the next fleeting
American dream:
I hear an
impossible love
sigh through all
of this close to
dusk, the roar
and rump of
a younger world
waking on the
other side of
the trees across
the lake, the
ancient titan
libido unfurling
its stout tuber
and red snout
aching toward
the place in
the sky where
the moon will
soon rise from
the sea: I hear
a woman calling
me distant pure
& sad as I
crunch up the
gravel driveway
of my wife’s parents
house to resume
our family night
late & later
in a life that
cannot be
contained or
properly sung:
Blue Hamer
Phantom guitar
at the muddy
stinky bottom
of Lake Charm
chained to
the ankle of
a woman whose
eyes now flicker
open and bore
into my back
as I head inside
to smile &
eat cake &
laugh at the
singing mounted
bass my brother
in law gave
my wife’s father
: “Don’t
worry, be happy”
it mouths,
flapping its
rubber tail to
some cheesy
faux-keyboard
& rhythm machine
music): We
celebrate what
we otherwise
& perhaps
nevertheless
will perish from:
my wife cranking
the handle
of a vat of
homemade
icecream, turning
and smiling at
me as I join
the crew talking
on the desk:
A pretty woman
despite midage
& family loss
& desperate to
make something
good of herself
in her world:
Later I work the
crank when the
ice cream’s almost
done, hard going
reserved for
the hard man
& I sweat and
strain delighted
to be that man:
Soon we ladle
up the vanilla
ice cream so
smooth and
cold and
delighful, a gift
greater in that
moment than
all that would
take us away:
Turn toward this
family gathering
with the great
sky now dark
& the lake
lost in its pouty
fevers, forgotten
at least for
these minutes
when we’re
grateful for
ice cream &
what time we
have here: Spoons
clacking in the
dark, laughter,
the hum of insects
& frogs rising
to sing of what’s here:





PRIAPAL EPIGRAM #8

from The Priapeia
transl. Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton, 1890

'Why be my parts obscene displayed without cover?' thou askest:
Ask I wherefore no God careth his sign to conceal?
Wieldeth the Lord of the World his thunderbolt ever unhidden,
Nor is trident a-sheath given to the Watery God:
Mars never veileth that blade whose might is his prevalent power,
Nor in her tepid lap Pallas concealeth the spear:
Say me, is Phoebus ashamed his gold-tipt arrows to carry?
Or is her quiver wont Dian in secret to bear?

Say, doth Alcides hide his war-club doughtily knotted?
Or hath the God with the wings rod hidden under his robe?
When did Bacchus endue with dress his willowy Thyrsus?
Who ever spied thee, Love! wilfully hiding thy torch?
Ne'er be reproach to myself this mentule ever uncover'd:
Lacking my missile's defence I shall be wholly unarm'd.


***

HYMN TO PRIAPUS


2006

Statues of Priapus, ithyphallic
son of Aphrodite and Dionysos,
were set in Roman gardens
to promote fertility while
warding off thieves and pilferers.

He walks behind me, laughing low,
gloating, dragging his huge phallus
like a swollen tail or Cupid’s rudder,
just finished or readying I can’t tell,
humming a bawdy tune from
the lowest dive in high heaven,
& uttering, at ear’s length, a curse
that my urges steal in kind from me:

rumpatur, precor, usque mentulaque
nequiquam sibi pulset umbilicum

Good lord! Is what possessed me
to creep back into Eden and steal
those cabbages by moonlight
what now possesses me to cross
all borders in pursuit of pussies
and mouths and asses, each a
noose for shame that He ganders
with ditch-gutterals then gooses?
He laughs somewhere behind me,
or under, the rudest deity of all,
still regnant and potent in fascinosum
and pure thrall, parting the sheaves
and branches with proud mentule
at oak-limb’s length, knocking against
my head this cudgel of verses ruddied
from his rout. Surrender is the only
escape from Him but submit here
only if you dare; delight in slackened
angel’s wings if you purpose
slickened pubes, the wave-crest
of thrust in Eve’s own soak,
the salt plumage of ball-deep hairs
absconded from all your heirs.
For steal you thus, thy fruit is His.