Verses/Curses
telescopic texts (avec "?") (5/x)
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric —
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the verbs of love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability —
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
//
wa’alaikumsalam + selamat purnama 🌕
Aphrodite's verb for a meme-lord
don’t be gender-strung
brother, grinding in a corner
sexless repetitions.
go limp a little.
let be won a little.
let the sun a little soften
your margarine edges.
the men i know
resemble a differently-
tipped tree than you.
my men are fundamentals, lost
in parched landscapes, empty
of water, warmth, and mercy,
from where, i teach them love.
lusty giants bristle-trunked
and planet-stranded, are nipple-
slit and magma-branded
by fully-armored Mars.
but cold palms trembling
twiddle the ephemeral course
with your recurrent inkling.
you, pocketed by four-
fingered mercenaries, twenty-
four, seven, re-puppet the gifted goose.
smoke the flat potion.
blowhard the hollow motion.
worship the literal juice.
shout, as if spilled clout
were potency, your wee-
throated catharsis.
strong-arm, for and from
the haptic trill,
a lover’s pity.
you, lordly and viral, left your
deflated blubber on
the public bedside table,
honey— your woodless worms
exhausted into empty domain
of static, remorseless maw.
and tender pussycat,
she swat. then low-key, she
your factum, deposited
into her rainy-day, furry-frosted
milkmaid, snappy the snatch-
game crocodile account.
//
Æ.5 (butane lighter)
are you ungovernable,
and getting hot — like me? we’ll be
tempestuous, together.
ours, of cosmic squabs,
result in smoke-stained sheets
and purple bruises. of Mars,
don’t worry, baby
your revolver is magnetic.
let’s go collapse.
//
not a monkey, but
it’s true that books
can take you anywhere.
hunger roots you
firmly in a body.
reading, i become
voices in the dark.
poetry is
a voice, self-
lightening.
witness to ways
waves move, as their own
mostly hidden seasons.
everything independently
becomes a turning
Inferno.
we are sloshing buckets,
pitchers pouring
into rivers, subterranean.
all of it true,
at once.
Hanuman is only
a secret patron
of poets.
//
telescopic texts (avec “?”) (4/x)
this spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
the trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled —
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am unhidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life of tree of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother, madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir — he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the ripened fruit with naked eye.
(says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.)
//
Sweetie and Frankie
she’s His new girl,
when Grace is busy
intensely mothering.
Sweetie is the chaos maker—
always (oopsie) closer than
she needs to be, to cocks
who are not Frankie.
it’s always
me, me, me
with Sweetie.
she needs to eat
out of your hand, until
she makes a war
of you, of Frankie.
she runs
to you. Frankie
sees only
immortal flames of rage.
yes! yes—
yes.
i see you,
Sweetie.
//
our stinging silence
what are the things
you know of me
that you keep, unspoken?
the secret me you keep
and by extension,
my undiscovered twin.
is it family or alien?
or do i have no right
to such distinction.
i have been, for some
two thousand years
or more, dissolving
in waspish creation.
i am, who has been long-
forgotten. already, i am
not of conversation.
a fuzzy, artless form
is turning in the paper
of a nest, drowning
in droning oceans — the ply
of dialogue, subsumed
by black battalions.
can you hear them?
they are humming
the densest metaphors.
//
lapsed momentarian
seed fluff billows
across the black mat
(inhale
jump back
chaturanga)
so much
for so little
for so much
immaterial
globe, a memory
of lost focus
dream
of a body, as wind
seeking structure
the velvet blue
of a butterfly wing
i don’t know why
things are shaped
the way they are
sent
published, and yet
anecdotal
birds who can’t fly
insects without words
studying
to be a container
for the already
understanding
it is needful
to be broken
//
telescopic texts (avec "mon oncle") (3/x)
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny
crown, her hair, each barb a bell, each herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past. nevertheless, he asks —
why, woman, have you gone au natural?
//
the way of buah potong
discreetly,
the membrane
he seeks
where earlier skin
defines still-
vibrant
pupal pulp
some flesh
surrenders simply
to cutting
releases seeds
like fish eggs
to a spoon
some arms itself
with stinks and spines
( the risqué
are forbidden
in public places
but true buah
is nowhere
vulgar )
or squeezes
open, slurpy
pearls of furry
mollusk
some section
selectively, not
as you like it
whining pith or
dogged rind
crumbling shards
of jewels,
broken
but
felt gently,
their presence
is luminous
crescents
sliced
stars
skinless egg
of snake
tumbled boulders
of Mars
he speaks
with knife
submits
in pieces, re-
composed
honeyed
and binding
as Yusuf
suffering
many
( and blade- )
kissed
fingertips
//
rendered even
i’m no stranger
to losing my oomph
now and again
all of you out there, the ones
interesting through
one of those
a crack.
a crease.
a seam.
a crevasse.
calcification occurs
when you don’t pay attention
we can see so much. the breadth
and depth of stories
his mind is
a soupy circle of rain,
sediment-heavy
can’t hold her
knows it’s slipping
getting colder
two of everything
was barely nothing
but admiration
and a calm certainty
a black umbrella
hidden
in a yellow curve
this place is beautiful,
and it’s transforming you
a woozy sacrilege
rendered
even, more
//
waalaikumsalam, selamat tilem, peace 🌑
idea for the public-facing garden
three fates
with gigantic anime
boobies
Clotho
Lachesis
Atropos
dewi
of some
stranger land,
bodies carved
painstakingly
in wood
are set
to rule a while
from garden,
rambling
flowers bracelet
round their
skinny limbs
bending over
facing up
as if to see
the water aspect
of they and their
bosoms reflected
pornographic
sanded and grainy
thread-makers,
rippling
serene cut
in glassy pond
of koi
//
telescopic texts (avec “mon oncle”) (2/x)
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind,
(he said), obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
red bird, whose course is old and hardly true,
and yet, he lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the east.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue.
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
//
telescopic texts (avec “mon oncle”) (1/x)
and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
their lines wrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives, and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate the spectacle,
coupling one who spoke, no, no, not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed at playing ‘swords?
to quell the bubbling spring by means of rain,
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing
//
the carrion
by Charles Baudelaire (original translation. cw: necrophilia.)
remember the object we saw, my soul
that summer morning, soft and sweet
at a twist in the path, a foul carrion
in its bed, seminated with pebbles
its legs in the air, as a woman aroused
hot and dripping with poisons
splayed in a cynical, nonchalant way
womb swollen with expirations
the sun shone fully on the decay
as to roast it, until just right
to return as millions to Nature’s noblesse
the cosmos she had contained
and heaven saw the magnificent carcass
as a blossoming flower
the stench was so potent, there on the grass
you thought you might collapse
the flies buzzing around the putrid belly
were issuing black batallions
of worms, pouring forth, pustulent
along the living tatters
the whole descended and rose like a wave
or sprayed in a sparkling spume
one could say the body, swole by murky breath
flourished in its inflation
and the world was rendered a stranger song
of watery flux and the wind
or grain that a winnower’s rhythmic geste
turns and churns in a basket
the shapes dissolved, no more than a dream
a sketching slow to arrive
on canvas forgot, where the artist derives
from memory alone
behind the rocks, an anxious bitch
watched us with angry eye
le squellette awaiting a chance to reclaim
the morsel that she had left
— and though you will be the same as this filth
as this horrible infection
stars of my eyes, sun of my nature
you, my angel, my passion!
yes! such will you be, O queen of graces
after the last sacraments
when you go, beneath fatted flowers and grasses
to moulder amongst the bones
then, O my beauty! say to the worm
who is eating you with his sex
i have kept the shape and essence divine
of my loves' decomposition!
//
waalaikumsalam 🌒
small town lullaby
the corpse
is a house, nobody
needs to enter
its gift
is apology
for anyone
not to be there
yet it nurses
its nibbling
worm
//
💀
mosquito milk
she caught you sucking
on her breast today,
mosquito
did you think
she was
your mother?
a poet makes
a pretty
terrible
mother
for
a mosquito
//
waalaikumsalam 🌓
snow white turning
has the twinkle ever
been for nothing
more than
to leave
a loving
artifact
to make
a deathless
hen,
whose faith outpaced
her season’s augury
this fruit is sticky
stretchy,
furious
its nectar possessed
of Lethean ambience
my arms are glittering
swans, my pillows
pur de lait, my eyes
are royal-blooded
blue navé, my dreams
are dialogues
of dolphins
how can she
believe the verbs
you writ, when all
you tender-left
were winterscape, or
sidereal tongue-
traps, of snowmen
that psychedelic night,
she sapped the wine
and stole the spade
howl-lit, she went
digging
in mud of your
decaying spring
for word-eaten
bodies
to meet
the gristled
marrow
to touch and leave
fingerprints
melting
on tongue
rose red grows
from a hollow bone
while moon-
shot belladonna
is kissing cousins
with bull-horned
hemlock, reckless
and honest
//
animal entertainment
they were watching us
as we ate our dinner
the grazers and
the gazing, directly
we felt
disconcerted,
on display
after some symposium
the resolution was
to recompose our stars
and watch them back
//
la poule noire sans doute
raven-wise, reposed
with shoulders drawn
her plumage welded closed
to element, like armor
buffeted by claps
and blows, beset
by quaggy flows, she was
more resolute than rain
roosters inamorato pecked
and disapprobed
her cocky, warlike ‘no’s
still Grace was stone, unmoved
fortress of mother earth
her body wholly was
the boulder fastly rolled
to staunch a secret planet
O chickening unheard
verb terminal
undead-end metaphor
catastrophe obscura
that hid, against her bald-
plucked breast, the titt-
tittering bavardage
des enfants geomantiques
//