Poem: Hungover Sun

You have to be careful

In a profession such as mine

When alcohol is the only currency

You’re likely to be paid in

You wake up in the morning

And will the bed sheets to transmogrify

Into the dream woman of your choice

Aliens consulting you with metallic tones

Trickling from angelic, silver tongues;

Stacks of books

Rise up to oppress you

Skinning you with an antiquarian scholarliness

That leaves no cathedral unturned

I suppose I can cope with the nausea

But who couldn’t

After playing witness to my smile?

I fall off a barstool

Throw up a song

And watch the hungover sun

Hesitatingly rise

 

 

Poem: Garland of Secrets

Sweet girl,

Divine girl,

Imagination-sculpted girl,

Shall I sing a song for you?

I steep myself in ancestry

And follow the trail of tongues

That gave lustre to silence

Long before I stirred from the elective mutism

Of my untutored, bornless years

In solitude, spirits throng among me

The air congeals with a luminosity

That lifts me up with cheers

I am a regal lamb

Singing hymns to my own invisible court

My first hallucinations were of clouds;

Then came cities and towers;

A vast plexus of complex relations

Arising from the subtle ecology

Of my Petri-dish mouth

To prop myself up

Against hours that might better knock me down

I think of you, My Ladyship,

And admire your flowing gowns

As you stroll languidly beside me

In my mind, we have married and divorced

More times than I can count

Though I scarcely know you enough

To kiss you all over your back

I take a bite into an apple

And it is as though the flesh of the universe

Is being by martyred by my teeth

As much as I wish your own inexperienced molars

Would sink seductively into my own

Your petrified realness

Thaws my aloofness

An unspoiled sweetness

Like a forgotten mountain lake

Over which no boat

Has ever sailed

Secrets, secrets, secrets –

My life is a garland of secrets

Which I hide in your untilled meadow

Where I lay me down to lie

 

Poem: Lady In Waiting

You should always be on guard

When you see me get out my pen

I am probably about

To write a love song to you

Why go to the expense of kissing you

When a love poem testifying I’ve dreamed as much

Will do just the same?

But still, I’ll seek out your company

And try and find

The sweet spot in the silence

Where our tongues might unite

Exchanging words as time bombs

That explode with untold wishes;

I see young couples clasp one another

And I feel like a foreigner

Yet it’s all so intimately illustrative

Of how I feel all of the time

But I can hear your unuttered secrets

The way your eyes dart to my lips

I am a lady in waiting

And I wait for my lady

As the tea inside my heart

Softly brews its own permission

 

Poem: The Single Man

When you’re a single man

Underwear models are your only friends

Women come out of the walls

To tackle you to the ground

This is why men get wives:

To act as body guards

Against the unending hoards of nubile beauties

Always throwing themselves

As your smelly feet

Well, wouldn’t that be a treat!

Oh, Women of the World –

You know my number!

So give me a call at three in the morning

When you know I won’t answer

 

Poem: To Worship

What does it mean

“To worship”?

To worship something

Is to appreciate it so intensely

That the electricity of your enjoyment

Inseminates everything you are

Creating constant friction

Which creates more electricity

Until all that you worship

Is you

You cannot worship something

By placing it on a pedestal

Unless you grind your cunt

Against that pedestal

Until your mon veneris bleeds

With affection

Don’t worship from afar

But with terrifying closeness

Like a man on an electric fence

Writing odes to his own electrocution

To worship

Is to be alive

Nothing more

Nothing less

So worship every moment

You can start by taking off your dress

 

Poem: Song to a Muse

You are a bower of bliss

A little fortress of possibility

Slithering into my awareness

With those unforgettable brows

And that visage of excitable calm

How could I not take you as my daughter

And leave you in the road to die?

Oh, don’t ask why!

Isn’t it enough just to know

That I am here to be your guide;

Your psychopomp through valleys far and wide?

And to teach you to address

Those chains of experience

That will thus constrain and arouse you?

Why you should be on THIS raft of the living

Is your purpose alone

To guess

But your power is great

And it is just my delight

To bring it into fruition

 

Poem: Tapster’s Song to Vajrayogini

Oh, my magnificent Vajrayogini!

Thank you for treating me roughly

You have trained me to build the cathedral of flame

And to pinion myself on its lonesome spires

You make love to me

Both violently and gently

Eroticizing the flaming canals of my body

Until my flesh sears with unbearable delight

You whisper sacred teachings to me

That sound like dirty words

Thus the mantra of “FUCK FUCK FUCK”

Must always be proclaimed

But most of all

You have rebirthed me

As love and lust incarnate

To treat my body as a flaming palace

That must be available to all

Who amongst you will walk my hallowed halls?

To seek out the secret entrance

To my pentagrammatical pelvis?

Or find the tetragrammaton

In my twinkling eyes?

To find the ten-syllable mantra

Wreathed around my scrotum?

Or the imperishable words of saints

Writ on the crystal betwixt my thighs?

Burning phallus!

Burning phallus, thou!

Kidneys, Sacrum,

Skull and monk!

Indestructible Maiden arise

Let’s both get drunk!

 

 

Poem: Medievalism, Oh!

Oh, glorious, glorious gloom!

You give me so much more room

To manoeuvre

My strange, windy ways

I’d much rather an underworld

To a glittery sky palace;

Give me those burning pathways of fire

Those strange canopies of skin

From unknown bestials derived

It is a horrid factory of immaculate earth

Churning out planets in manufactured succession

The torment of tears

In every galactic eye

I ascend the bruised mountain

Searching through its scarred face

To find the erotic teachings of the past

This is my bestiary – my own private menagerie

Housing monsters and gryphons

Both shewn and showed

Down the musky, dusky husk go I

Into the perfume of Empyrean

To steal the stars from their own night owls

And teeth plucked straight from the mouth

Of the pearly, opalescent ocean

Thereat, I will plunge into

The Cascade of my potion

Dribbling into the furnace

And the fetid potluck

I swear has alchemical powers:

First the Dragon – then the Fly;

Second the Tiger – next Magpie;

Crossing across the roof of the world

To join with the moss

And the lossiest Loess

Ah, Frantic Medievalism!

Medievalism ornate and deformed!

Take me back to your DARK AGES

When books were pillows

And the sacred castles of Oddiyana

Were still ariot

With treacherous claws

But to the archfiend and the nemesis

Subdued in wrath by designer sedatives

Are now only wending their way

Through the Tartarus of Modernity:

Old People’s Homes

Arguing about who

Last saw the TV remote

And whose dementia

Is progressing the fastest

And the worst

“I’ve forgotten twelve thousand more gigabytes

Of chaotic data than you!”

Exclaims lusty Belial,

Twisting his sandwich

Into a tridental narrative

“What?” says Satan, subdued

His is brain is now only

A tuna fish sandwich

And he thinks he still sees his children

Though they died long before he ever did

It’s a sad state of affairs

When demons need enemas

And harpy-faced nurses

To put spittle on their

Unraging bones

Still Medievalism howls

In every village

Of the British and the Welsh

Wherever crows still rule

With their iron caws

And their iron claws

But I have lost my marbles completely now

So I tuck myself back in

Inside my own inviolate scrotum

And within Involution’s allure

Mark off the beginning of the day

 

Poem: The Lover’s Itch

Oh, my love!

I could weave you a dress of kisses

Moistening them onto your body

Stitch by beloved stitch

But what of when you need to undress?

I’ll kiss them away as wishes

That when it comes tomorrow

You’ll still feel the lover’s itch

 

Poem: Wife to all The World

I look at the world

And I want half the women in it

To be mine

Oh, how could I ever commit?

Any more than a leaf can commit

To a tree it knows, come autumn,

It must inevitably fall away from

I am not some steadfast pine;

My heart is decidedly deciduous

Always burning the brightest gold

Before it falls away

So don’t ask me to stay

When I must sojourn with multiphasic faeries

I am both masculine hermit

And wife to all the world

So I make no move

But stay enraptured

In this net

Of provocative stalemate

Yet the girl with the tigrous eyes

Lingers on by and by

I divorce myself from selfish love

And give totality a try