I kiss her goodbye
and can still taste
my dick on her lips,
slightly larger from the friction.
Remember the taste well,
goodbye, goodbye,
Don't forget the burning
the gagging,
The sight of me penetrating your best friend
goodbye goodbye,
Thanks for the service,
I've no regrets,
Let's leave it like this,
goodbye, goodbye,
Let this purity happ'ly haunt
our distant, ebbing future nows,
goodbye, goodbye,
Your pleasuring greatness palpable may haunt your remaining days,
or hours,
or weeks,
and in this way I've possessed you,
taken your soul as I kiss goodbye,
no more, goodbye,
goodnight, ladies,
Better to know a good wine
though it be no longer available to you
and the wines you have taste like grapes
yearning for the sublime but ever failing,
this maddening gulf,
love and lost and all that,
goodbye,
Thanks for letting me revenge myself against all the cruel
or thoughtless female barbs
of heartbreak and desolation,
revenged against your flesh,
pressed inside, most intimate,
that soft consolation,
a heaven for forgotten pains and refound self,
goodbye and goodnight,
hope you can walk to-morrow,
hope it still hurts in a week, my love,
in a year, on your deathbed, [28 | 29]
dozens of pale imitations having visited you between,
like ghosts,
goodbye, goodbye,
I can still feel your split cunt on my dick,
softly soothing,
goodbye, goodbye,
Maybe once more,
no, goodbye,
I've other callings to pull me from your bed,
your limbs so lithe,
your willing, tender, rolling mouth,
one last kiss,
the taste of my balls on your lips,
It'll only grow bad if I stay,
I'd no expectations but a night's submission,
a growling exorcism of semen,
the feel of your legs against my arms,
so smooth, such submission,
one last suck,
no, on to other things,
let the jealousy of you looking at another never come to mind,
too late, once more,
spread now, one last fuck,
let your friends clean your pussy from me,
remove the memory of you from my body,
I'd never leave you if I thought you'd give me what I want,
you've proven good for ecstasy of the most physical sort,
but,
those soft pussy lips spread around my cock's base,
your moan, soft whimper, half-repressed, of pain,
your legs closing, instinctive, for fear of injury,
and your relaxing them to please, taking the beating of your innards,
goodbye to all that,
I'm off to write,
to transmute this into gold of a different sort,
to refine the pleasure extracted from those mines,
and respect myself in the morning,
as I mourn your spread, surrendered, impaled body,
and remember.

write yourself free, boy, write yourself free

"fit fuel for love" --
fuel for fitful love,
self-fueling, the explosion redoubling
at its consumption:
fuel found when fuel burned -- [29 | 30]
so much for Freud, so much more for the Victorians.

Women lie
on their backs and in the sack,
in the malls and peopled halls,
lie or lie, a choice symantic,
a textual dispute of women's role and worth.

I wrote this poem; now spread your legs.

Milton was a great love poet, Donne too didactic.

"Paradise / Inferno, Its Lack Purgatory":
it's the burning not absence that's hell,
though perhaps Purgatory's worse.
How easily the pleasures divine,
so simple, so pure,
turn to stabs of pain.
When you confuse the quiet comfort of Purgatory
for the Inferno, you're willing to risk the real Inferno,
so desperate for that Paradise you've become

We spend our lives for others.
"He for God, her for God in him."
Her, on her back, "a pleasing sacrifice."
Each of us spends our life for a better,
even if that better be an imaginary future self.

Here we are, chasing Osiris,
trying to put together the fragments
but his member's not to be found
and our reconstructions are sexless, though glorious.

I am nigh impossible
to love
not for being
unlovable
but for being too
demanding
"I've never met anyone for whom the songs are true":
that's what Hef said,
surrounded by
bunnies at the end of
his life.
"I was born to love you"
so the song says.
So I felt I should say [30 | 31]
so I cannot help
myself not to
expect
I'm offered so much
pussy and I
can't bring myself to
fuck them unless
I hear those words
I'd laugh if I
heard them
when I heard them
I'd see them as
ridiculous, obvious
lies, even mock them
if I heard the words
I need

all women are whores
they cost my time if not my money
(though the former be more precious)
and I'm not willing to pay for it

there's not a person I know from whom I'm unprepared to hear
that I should leave and never speak to her again
perhaps for (un)seen crossing some line of unforgivable transgression
perhaps merely due to her insanity mere unpredictability humanity
you have to be ready to lose anyone at a moment's notice
to grab your bags and go without jeopardizing them
not to be unemotional but they'll be time for cryin' later
but to be controlled to not let those tears prevent those necessary moves
you must be prepared to lose any piece on the chess board
even your beloved queen
and they say I can't trust
but I say this isn't neurosis
(or if it is it's only ‘cause it's unorthodox, not ‘cause it's ill-judged)
I can trust just fine
fall into someone's arms knowing she'll catch me
but aware that landing on my ass is a small price to pay
to diagnose a misperceived loyalty trust
I can't afford to lose the game when the stakes are this high
do you trust me they ask
no meaning yes but I have to be prepared for that to be misplaced

that lounging next to you nude
in the afternoon sun after life had fallen apart
that tasted good, [31 | 32]
that simple smile that made me think
you understood

you'll never know, dear,
how many times I've cried in silence
what I've felt
(who I am?
what I am?)

this game of charades we call love
this balancing act we call love

I see a woman sitting alone, sad in isolation,
and I know she's the one and that I'll never have her

these frantic desperate kisses of a dying animal

our social gatherings are fashion shows
our trying not to look like we're trying

you want me to be myself
but you don't want to see me cry

every billboard telling me to get over it
every video telling me to just fuck her, just use her

a lightning bug smashed on the windshield,
its guts spread in a glowing glob

all

she has tits
I feel them on my back
as she caresses it:
this is what I dream at night in bed,
in the terrible lack of other.
She has tits and she loves me.
That's all I ask.
No, that's a lie: that's the simplicity of the hurt I feel
at three in the morning.

Give me ten stellar beauties
or better yet one who loves me.

We find love the most interesting subject because it is the most peculiar.
There's little controlling when it strikes. At best, one's [32 | 33]
settin' the conditions
like lightnin'. A lightning rod made o' perfume and smiles
and melting shoulders and the secret recipe of tug and pull.
We sacrifice everything for it. It turns the most logical among us
Into the most neurotic. Yet for all this it serves no purpose.
We spend our lives wanting love we cannot feel
but for seconds here and seconds there.
Its biological purpose? To kill us off. If we don't kill each other,
we'll kill ourselves. A great hero's life needs a love story to tie it together
like a bow. The woman twirling on the beech sums up man's aspirations.
Everything gained, everything lost. I talk with her on the phone
and talk of movies and music and academics and the meaning of life
but I never get around to saying, simply, that my greatest regret in life
was not fucking her and my greatest sadness is that she wasn't mine
in circumstances when I could have wanted her. Such is the end of the world.
Brilliance. Milkshake. Let it lead to nothing, we'll have no pudding tonight.

A lot of women have a crush on him,
my mother tells me about a famous wrester.
I don't think that qualifies as a woman.

I've just realized that, like a movie, I focus
on how relationships form and fall apart -- but that during stage eludes ...
clearly there's not this romantic rolling-around-on-the-floor
(unless faked)
nor the sitting staring into each other's eyes, the boat rides without point:
everyone forsakes their jobs in stories the moment they attain love.
I can see the one, investing in this love, coming to need it,
committing to making that relationship last, that love that is duty survive
when that love of other ebbs and appears to die; but
I cannot see, cannot, cannot, believing that she's investing likewise,
presuming that she's taking it seriously in the same way.
I used to presume exactly this, and it's these
few moments in which you realize you've changed without knowing it
in which you're actually alive.

The Book of Love?
I wrote the copyright.

Take off your clothes so I can beat you. [33 | 34]

Who cares about unwed pregnancy?
The issue is unwed, or uncommitted, sex.

Blood Utopia

Why buy a cow
when you can fuck
one at home for free?

In last evening's unconscious ponderance,
I had her close beside,
my yielding absent loving love,
my thought her flesh.
Fucking endlessly that bliss, soft as air, man-making,
man-unleashing, of which a taste leads to abandon,
like a man offered a heaven most immediate, sampling it,
and then having to choose between its heroin and a book,
I grabbed her body and twisted it like a scarf or a happenstance
to my right, lying perpendicular to her head like silly putty, irrelevant,
and I gazed as this sex object head, all pussy and mouth
burned down to essence, so small, beautiful, pure and efficient,
the body hanging twisted, smaller now, to the side like a shed skin,
and she still wanted my pleasure as I fucked that reduced nothingness,
and I wondered why I had not thought of this before.

How easy to become a recluse devoted to this mode of existence.
Poetry, the gods, study, and sex:
these are what separate us from the world.

Hello, cunt.

It would please me.
That is all ye need to know on earth.

He: If I told you that you'd burn in hell for a millennia
for each drop of come you brought me to ... .
She: I'd tell you to enjoy me irregardless.
A millennia cannot compare with your pleasure.

She: I feel ... you have enlightened me.
You have shown me beauty.
I know I am forever in your debt
and all the more that you have helped my soul and not my body.
What money I have is yours. Here, take it
or leave it, it has been given. But I have no
enlightenment to give you from this feeble soul,[34 | 35]
whose poetry is of some much lesser denomination.
I would not insult by giving a halfpenny
for a priceless, irreplaceable vase.
He: You have a pussy. Your body is young.
I pray you, offer its use, give that to me
and only me, to take or no. I may at least
have that gift most physical, most fleeting.
She: I am appalled. That I cannot give.
He: Yet you claim to be in my debt. Were you
starving, near death and in pain, your body
nigh extinguished, would you not trade your services
for bread? Would you not do more
than flatter with your tongue at some distance,
but rather flatter with it at some depth?
She: I must admit I would. But this is different.
He: Yes, it is. But the crucial difference lies
(as do you, as wish I to do) in type not circumstance.
Have I not fed you? And was it not needed?
Was your soul not starved for beauty, for truth?
Did you not receive my words like some desperate water,
gulped with abandon, refreshing to a soul
so starving as to think itself dead,
and thus not feel the pains of hunger?
She: It did, but I will not yield.
He: Then you favor the body o'er the soul.
A special place in hell awaits you for this.
She: But this request comes after the fact.
He: Did you not acknowledge you were in my debt?
Perhaps you are quick to reward extortion
and slow to reward kindness. If so, you extortion
deserve, and so the gods shall grant you.
She: ‘Tis but a small thing. Why do you want it so badly?
He: If ‘tis but a small thing, the sooner you should part with it
and let me part it. It matters not that I want it,
since you are in my debt. You would willingly pay
with its superiors. Perhaps
you are reluctant to pay with such a small coinage;
if so, let me impart:
I shall gladly accept payment in part.
She: You reason well, but something holds me back.
He: With your chastity depart. What place has bodily morality
compared with art? Therefore, strip and let us start.

Seduction is the only poetry.
Are there any words but "spread" and "suck"?

Wandering through her apartment years later, [35 | 36]
I see her breasts again,
as I almost crash into her, walking into a room as she's walking out,
her boyfriend in the room adjacent. "Oops," she exclaims, so innocently,
and heads back in as I head out, away. When I make some feeble
apology, thinking times have changed since those nudist college days --
"I didn't mean to embarrass you," I think I said --
and she, with perfect throw-away grace, says quickly, informally,
perfectly at ease,
"I wasn't embarrassed; I'd just forgot something,"
as she commences to watch TV, her shirt now on.
I'm thinking of those breasts now,
of how little she knows they mean to me,
how those soft curves rest so softly in my mind,
seem so perfect here, abstracted,
so yearning for my hands, my lips,
all the more hauntingly for the illicit glimpse, the momentary voyeurism,
the illicitness all in me, while she seems always innocent despite
a past to me illicit, saddening, tragic as Œdipus.
Were these the breasts that launched a thousand ships,
that have hoisted a thousand of my masts
and left me longing, all these years, to conquer her oft-occupied Ilium?

Precious Katherine!
All women to me are you,
and you all that's good of them!
Your name thus invoked sets my mind to your ass in my bed
when we were still as children,
to my fingers in your quoint, my nakedness on yours,
and that this paradise was never possess'd,
never stormed, that you wished to sleep,
that you refused (so unlike my lovers) to take instructions on pleasing me
with your mouth, and never tried again, my love,
and never tried again.
But you in person disappoint,
each glee has a boredom for company, ne'er there
in our youths; you manipulate openly and still take orders
poorly. You miss the point of my sadness, and drunkenly pursue a point
that seems minor, not your best, exhausting it well but leaving me
aching for what could have been. I think of those dicks in you,
lover, of their sweat on you, of their come in your mouth,
and the picture of your simply smiling form that I hold in my mind
chills and grows a tombstone for the possible.
Your smile thrills me like none other,
you alone I let touch my face, touch me, [36 | 37]
for you alone I keep this maddening love.
But I hate you for your imperfections
and for not giving yourself to me,
that I did not take that body at its peak,
and that you've never shown me the love I craved.
Don't worry: I'll punish thirteen girls for you,
break their hearts, fuck them and treat them coldly,
hardening my heart to their tears even when they're better,
by any objective list, than my unexplainable you. Don't worry, dearest,
I'll show them not the love I reserve, unbidden, for you;
I'll pass a little suffering on, this sexually-transmitted disease
of unrequited love.

You make me sad. Is there any more?
Yes: I love you and see no difference anymore.

when I think of you, I want to fuck a stranger
this seems by far the sexiest compliment possible
by repressed dissatisfied me

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
Why don't you fuck it, dear Henry, dear Henry?
Why don't you fuck it and leave me alone?

Am I a misogynist? Of course.
Could any one could have felt as much pain in the name of women as I
and not to some extent hate them? Do we blame the concentration camp
survivor for having some hate for Germans? Do we blame Samson
for hating Delilah? But hate is love, elevation, care.
The revolutionary in hating a government elevates it.
Should we blame the Palestinian under Israel today for hating Jews?
It may not be accurate, but it is infinitely intelligible.
In hating a unjust, circumcising, artistically and phallically intolerant
matriarchy such as ours,
of children, for children, by children,
can anyone but expect hate for those whose breasts grant them
privilege, additional rights and status, government money,
scholarships, sympathy, defenders?
And, in love, is not hatred of one's beloved due to her failings
and not her good, even as we hate our own failings (if ourselves good)
and love our good? Do we not seek to craft our loves into their ideals,
hating their missteps as we hate our painful own?
Misogyny? During a reign of terror?
Of chemical castration? [37 | 38]
When pictures of 14-year-old girls on your own computer
gets you two decade in the pen?
When a husband-killer gets two years and a wife-killer fourteen?
When a child, unintended (at least by him), becomes a leech for life,
draining money not for its self, its life,
but as a tool for its mother, her rights protected,
their lack of enforcement a scandal?
When we teach boys to hate themselves?
And women that they can (and should) get away with almost anything?
Slap those boys, girls, with lawsuits or hands:
men will beat them if they date slap back as you know they should.
Temptation this great, what good woman is there?
What you call misogyny I call ethics.

"They ... to good ends ... are so still,
But ... principall in ill":
Still so today, good woman-hating Jack.
And not only as fucks, dear ladies.
The worthwhile men have hearts, those few such men are you liable to find
As we few so very, very few of you.

I lose myself I want you to find me
I'm empty inside I want you inside me

god, those tits, those thighs
words fail such glory
that sliver where the clothes turn inward
that promise of paradise
those thin arms
I cannot abide flabby arms

I'm going to put my hands wherever they reach.
Your body's mine; no region's safe.
If a finger or a fist likes your soft aperture,
let it play. If a pinch, twist, squeeze, or caress
finds your clit, let that misplaced earlobe get what it gets.
It is not your role to question the gods.

gaping wide, pulled tight to an O
powerful hold on her hair
watching her sleep
my muse is never sick
chain her! bind her! let her speak!
beauty rages in great hearts
your loins are a large hollow wound [38 | 39]
as not for whom the dick grows erect
to make you raw material
if only your pussy, well stretched, could snap like a rubber band

Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Ah, here we are at line 69. A paradox despicable.

Looking at a glossy magazine, the star of some recent movie
face down on the beach. You can't get this stuff in pornography;
the art books don't have it either. You have to get a 100-page piece of glossy
crap for the three wonderful, beautiful, erection-of-the-soul-producing pictures.
Lucious, luscious, perfect skin, and I think I need one of those.
Gotta get one of those.
Mine.
The word that makes those tits so much sexier.
You have an ass.
This my purgatory, I would stay there forever.
Let's tell some oral histories.
Be a shrew, give me some lip.
What a pussy!
What a compliment!

It was a real ankle-biter.

Probably brainless, probably brainless.
But God ... you'd think someone would just buy me one.
A little pet with a tight soft pussy.
Let her be stupid so long as she's pliable.
She's no threat to someone I love.

Give me your tits.
Give me your legs.
Give me your obedience, your compliance, your submission.
Give me your love.

SPREAD YOUR FUCKING LEGS

Die, die, die!
(Am I playing the misogynist enough for you,
my dear hated ones who think their cunts don't stink but smell like roses?)

on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees [39 | 40]
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees
on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees on your knees

I've never seen WENCH in large bold caps
on a book cover. What a perfect title.
Part of a series with SLUT, HOLE, CUNT, PUSSY, and
Her Legs Parted Like Butterfly Wings
And I the Prick.
Gods but we need a word
-- slut, bitch, whore, all won't do --
for a woman good only for fucking.
They're so abundant yet without the appropriate slur,
like whore, critique and compliment both. [40 | 41]
Something like "pin cushion" but less syllables.
"Boy toy"'s getting there but so misused.
"Semen dropcloth"? I use the adjective "fuckworthy"
myself, as high praise of a body. Let's all agree
to use that for women's bodies and "cocktoy"
for women's minds, dull in body fuckworthy.
So many cocktoys, so few women.

Why, I ask my father. You can recover from a mother who beats you
-- that's only physical. But a wife that's a philistine?
Trapped with someone who prefers the newest comedy
and refuses (as if a point of pride) to watch subtitles.

I'd take a woman who beats my kids
over one who does not love Juliette Binoche.

What a radical, beautiful statement.

Is this my book of love poetry
that I'll feign regretting as a product of youth?

Who will love her? Menipius.
To whom will she give her love? Menipius.
To whom will she open her heart as she does her quoint? Menipius.
And who will love this used device that is her form? Menipius.
And who will hold her beasts, cup them in his hands? Menipius.
Who will gently kiss her back as he pounds her cervix? Menipius.
Who will feel her skull in his guiding hands? Menipius.
And who will love this headstrong beast? Menipius.
Whom does she love? Menipius.
And who shall tame her before it's too late? Menipius.
Who will teach her the joy of surrender? Menipius.
Who does she want to be? Menipius.
How easily tear off her nipples? Menipius.
Like a paper doll? Menipius.
Care you, dear reader, to fold the origami? Menipius.
And whose name does she call alone at night? Menipius.
For whom does she search? Menipius.
And whom will she find? Menipius.
And what is her reward? Menipius.
Who shall break this awkward creature? Menipius.
What is the rabbit left to its own devices? Menipius.
Is this the psychosis of liberation? Menipius.
Or has she conquered in absentia? Menipius.
Shall we call her name, this thing, this flapper spirit? Menipius.
What, then, is this about? Menipius.
This love? Menipius. [41 | 42]
Theses tits, that skin, that ass. Menipius?
Why then sit you still? Menipius?
Love me no more? Menipius?
Oh, lover, thou are too much like he, Menipius.
I find you nowhere and everywhere, Menipius.
You killed the Cyclops; you sailed the Nautalus, Menipius.
For you we all search, for you we chase the horizon. Menipius.
Arise and show yourself, Menipius!
But you are already here, Menipius.
You are the contour that haunts, Menipius,
the phantom vagina lingering on the penis. Dear Menipius,
you are the razor line between black and white. Menipius,
we are the pattern that line produces, all imagined, never there. Menipius,
we shall seek you always. Menipius
possesses one after another, then departs as soon as claimed. Slippery Menipius.
You are the new, Menipius.
The position never tried, the person never sampled. Menipius,
you are the one that got away. Menipius,
the one never found. Menipius,
the greener pussy just over yonder hill. Menipius?
I'm talking to you. Menipius?
Do you hear? Are you there? Menipius?

This purgatory of waiting, of all but the first taking
or the taking again for the first time,
fresh and new and perfect, that virgin moan,
that reeling mind and submergencesubmergencesubmergence.
Kill me, but end this purgation. Hell hath no wrath
like desire for a woman, scorned.

All I want is to believe that someone loves me
and not to hate my lover for not being a centerfold.
Is this too much for me to ask?
A woman who makes me feel loved
for more than four precious seconds in four years?
And, as much as I care for the souls of the fat and the ugly,
listen to them, feel their pain and my superficiality for not being attracted to them,
I've spent too long apologizing for and hating my dick,
its wants, its inclinations, its sensitive insensitivity [42 | 43]
to do so now. It's like a disease: it needs submissive pussy
attached to lithe, thin, sexy bodies to satiate it,
and if it does not get this medicine, I get irritable, chemically,
uncontrollably. Should I apologize for it?
The greatest pain in a relationship is being in a strip club,
sometimes known as the avenue,
and seeing someone more beautiful, perhaps more beautiful,
if only physically, than your lover -- a pain I detest and avoid.
The tyranny of female bodies
and the relief, if not pleasure, of knowing
"I have someone sexier at home that I can fuck whenever I want."
Even so, variety lacks. Others score multiple partners, diversified gratification,
while I score deeper penetrations, depth of carnal knowledge,
a catalogue of someone's responses to virtually any sexual stimuli
and a mastery of same. Better sex over multiple partners,
diversified positions over diversified lovers. But still there is the deep
suspicion that I'm getting a raw deal, that everyone else is just fucking
so easily, covering up half their "conquests" (if passing through be conquest;
I prefer cultural imperialism, dominating the culture at deep levels).
I suspect I'm missing out by not taking the pussies offered,
if only for a night, if only for fun or as a bribe for companionship.

They say they've mapped the ocean. There's a trench
off Japan deeper than any on land,
perhaps deeper than our minds can fathom,
like a child contemplating adulthood
or most of us contemplating a billion, or a trillion dollars.
Underwater volcanoes, subsea eruptions at which there is life,
upon which our own lives depend through carbon dioxide.
This subterranean emotional landscape, bubbling up but most forgotten.

What tenacity do these women have
to deny me their pussies?
Have we raised them to so praise rebellion
that they will not kneel before a god?

1, 2, 3, 4,
I smell a greasy whore

Hey, sister, whoa, sister,
You're such a ho, sister.

Suck, suck, obey, suck,
tie the leash upon yourself, [43 | 44]
tie, die, get fucked and die:
to fuck is to kill, to kill to fuck.
Get fucked, my dear, take it and like it,
you were born to please, designed to get fucked, to be used, to die.
Let me bury myself in your earth and resurrect myself, the magician returning
from the now-shattered earth: and who is buried now?

Colleges supply athletes with girls, cover-up rapes, under-age sex, &c.
Shouldn't the same be done for intellectual stars?
Shouldn't 200 I.Q. and innovative writing be recruited with as much zealotry?
What is it that we value as a culture
when colleges, the Masadas of intellectualism surrounded by hostile forces,
weigh the physical so heavily? Out of what? Money, anti-intellectual?
Where are my under-age whores? Why am I not smoking with other
intellectual mavericks, whose personalities are tolerated because of their results,
talking about Veronique, or Rebecca, or Stephanie,
or any of the other thin 16-year-olds we've passed around
with university support? Where are the sexual perks for brilliance?
Why does an athlete get pussy, that abstraction they cannot know
or even fuck, while one who is himself a sun goes unsatisfied?
Are women this condemnable? Is this culture so deeply
oppressive of my kind, my race, that even universities comply with vigor?
So misaligned, so transitory, so reprehensible.

She says, Katherine does,
tells her father right in front of me
-- as he's made comments to me privately, drunkenly,
that tell me he gets it,
like "you and her boyfriend are going to have to work that out"
and "you just have to find the right girl," followed by Katherine's arrival
into his field of vision and his comment, "here she is now,"
and we laugh, I painfully, and he sees this pain,
though, drunk, I wonder if he'll remember it
and am not sure Katherine caught it
and am not sure Katherine wouldn't willfully fail to perceive it
and am not sure Katherine wouldn't willfully ignore it if she did
-- that I have bad taste in women,
repeating it as if it were inexpressible.
When I challenge this, saying Claire's her only evidence,
she says that's all the evidence she needs.
She's part right, and I challenge her with Jessica, [44 | 45]
though she didn't know Jessica, never met her,
and I wonder if she knows that in my mind there was a choice:
that I chose Claire over her
at the time, not believing she would stop screwing around
even if she dropped her relationship at home,
that safety buoy, and took up with me.
A whore everyone'd fucked that I wanted as a lover.
No wonder she liked Theodora in Greek history.
It was risky, uncertain in initiating, uncertain in success.

She'd stayed with some idiot as I left, though we'd arrived together,
our eyes meeting and I looking, I imagine,
like some sad dog that sees his master with some idiotic, bouncy, fun dog
that doesn't love him the way he does.
She earlier said that she'd sleep with anyone, that she didn't understand why
people thought it a big deal, and he'd agreed, oh pain in my back.
I figured she'd told me then, probably consciously,
that the risks were too high for me,
that she'd never invest in sex what I needed her to invest.
For she who wants to be loved for her brain, it can't be a big deal;
but it is, biologically, whether we like it or not,
as I know as the skinny brilliant, prodigal boy
and you every time you put on make-up.

I define myself more by my mind than you, dear Katherine,
(What is this, recriminations?)
and I can see the meaning in sex,
the intense symbolism, the losses eternal every time,
of innocence, of the ability to see that symbolism,
of love and perhaps life. But I have soul.
No wonder you objected to your father, on another occasion,
saying you've no soul. I was flabbergasted then, taken aback,
and thought of defending you, but it was between you and your father,
and you weren't looking at me, weren't looking for defense,
and I couldn't know the context. It was your ability as a pianist,
considerable I'm told, to which he was referring.
But later you brought it up, pointing out I didn't defend you,
absurdly, inconceivably,
and I thought then as I thought at the time and think now,
there's some truth to that, that you have no soul.
I told you later, before your boyfriend,
who sat like an eager teenager though he's in his thirties
and pointed out the allusions and implications he got
and asked about those he didn't [45 | 46]
and thus wasn't there for my comment,
which at its level removed his presence,
that the problem wasn't that you had no soul
but, perhaps, that you had too much but were afraid to show it,
and I thought of you crying in your room at college
and how I hold you and felt closer then than at any other time,
how arousing that was, that accessibility in one so wonderful,
that acknowledgement of weakness you cannot show
when you don't look at me when you want me to defend you from Dad,
or when you don't admit you knew, you know, you know.

And there she is, crying in the bathroom, silenced by the walls and fans.

Ah, Katherine, I choose my women badly.
And what does that say of you, my dear, as I write this?
I imagine I don't look for good women as my lovers.
I look for smart, fabulous women as my friends.
For sex, I just want someone who'll get into any position imaginable
and do what I want -- lovingly, without
the baggage of a hundred strangers' penetrations.

I'm watching a brilliant collection of 1960s high school footage,
black-and-white but anything but:
a black speaking black vernacular just as one might today,
talk of racism and sex,
a gynecologist talking in an auditorium full of students
of pregnancy, "protection," of cherries
and how they'll called that because they bleed when punctured,
of how some vaginas are so tight that he hasn't been able to put his finger in,
accompanied by the joke that he gets paid for this,
and of cunnilingus, as he answers an anonymous written question
about whether a girl can get impregnated by inserting something other
than a penis by saying, "like what? A nose? No."
They all laugh.
Gods, forget it all: we're so much more repressed today.
They wouldn't get away with this assembly today.
The feminists and the religious have come together,
coercing their allies on either side of politics to agree;
we fight over what to terribly and disastrously repress,
with those arguing against it all relegated to late night TV
like circus freakshows we watch because we can't believe.
In the assembly, the speaker states,
"It takes a girl longer to get sexually aroused than a boy: [46 | 47]
this is the nature of the beast."
What's been lost is common sense.
He talks of virginity and sex, correlating number of sexual partners
inversely in graph with likelihood of successful marriage
or long-term relationship. Of course, he's right.
And today I hear these girls telling me they gave some idiot their virginity
because "I had to lose it eventually." And girls saying they take
many lovers along the way to marriage
so as to be better trained sexually when she finds Mr. Right.
So wrong-headed, so much a product of sexual propaganda
that seeks to ignore biology and any facts, thoughtfully interpreted.
Fuckin' crazy. The same chart's good today.
The cavalier ... the cavalier ... the thoughtlessness of this
casual fucking, of this accumulation of dead body partners.
Fuckin' crazy.

I don't expect to keep ‘em.
Like a work of art, it becomes my life but I'm barely underway
when I begin to contemplate the next one.
The goal isn't holding you like a stock of wealth,
but to write my name on you in indelible pen.

This is what your love produces in me, Katherine.
This insanity of the waiting room --
remembering each conversation, implication,
contemplating interpretation after interpretation,
which character knew what when, trying to spot the crux
at which fate could have been avoided, should have been avoided,
leaving me still with my eyes, those bleeding Gnostic wounds --,
leaving me to attempt purgation, over and lover,
somehow longing to get the thorn out.

Oh delicate penetration!, this poetry of dashes and commas,
of implications, of rhythm not words.

How am I to end this? To find paradise?
What sexual paradise but the transience of orgasm,
the glimmer of a woman's legs, a god expressed in the subtle curve of her ass,
this Katherine who will not quite write free.
Is claiming her a possibility? Will it be better than any imagination?
Won't it be a letdown, awkward after all these years,
like Rhett Butler getting the girl after too long a courtship?
Isn't it too late? Hasn't this long purgation, that hell of chains,
bound to a woman, some terrible internal corruption of external heaven? [47 | 48]
Does one arrive at the gates of paradise with gaping wounds?
With the legacy of failure? Doesn't sexual desolation
impose itself on the landscape of sex paradiso?
Does one get to the seraglio and hear a chorus of men sobbing,
some funeral internal? Some knowledge that she, then, is not here,
is gone, cannot return, the moment passed, this hell?
It's not worth it, is it,
this climb?
Descent?
Is this chaos surrounding me?
Have I been climbing so long that I don't know the way up anymore?
Have you ever been or are you now a member of the Communist party?
Let us not play the harp while the whales have stopped their singing.
Let us not repeat "let us not" because we have nothing but contempt.
We are not informers; this is not Siberia.
Give me not Marilyn Monroe, give me not this forgotten Katherine,
this lost paradise of old, this nameless sighing that taints everything.
The death card has been uncovered, but its meaning has not.

Sleep with me, Katherine.
Get fucked by me.
Then/Or go away. From my mind, from that soul you don't know what to do with,
you Northerner, specialist in emotional masks,
confuser of factories for English stoicism.

So many beautiful breasts on TV.
It's maddening.
Sheer, stark-raving, gun-to-the-head maddening.
A stupid movie of a man who discovers his rich family,
gets a beautiful wife, stunning body, luscious.
How does one react to this beauty?
To this want one feels palpably? To the ache in the chest?
One takes the message that money produces sexy lovers.
One thinks, "I've got to make it rich."
Even when one hates the injustice of capitalism.
Even the friend of this rich man is seduced wonderfully,
on the bed with this glorious thing.
But one also observes that this woman, this reward of wealth,
knows she is that, says she's in it for the money,
wants to be a thing, possessed, because his things are taken care of
and around other nice things. Like a sports car engine, she'll demand much
and she'll get it like any valued possession.
And she loves this and desires it.
But this is not what bothers me, not being in the situation. [48 | 49]
She cheats on him, perhaps as a result.
This luscious, wonderful thing -- who later says she really loves him.
She lets another man fuck her, use her, come in her.
This is no lover I would want.
She rants about how unmarried sex is better than married
and seeks a fling before the wedding,
as if the commodity being exchanged at the wedding
wasn't devalued by such philandering.
Her body craves a bullet after thirty hours of gang-raping.
Is this the best life has to offer?
Watching images of women that pain me,
only to know, over and over, as I'm pained,
that I'd regret knowing them, let alone sleeping with them?

They say that, in France, the intellectuals get the pick of lovers
along with the press coverage attendant a celebrity.
Is a celebrity determined by being celebrated?
Is being guilty determined by a court pronouncement?
Am I not the celebrity of this age?
And is my tragedy that the world is not "France"?

There are days when I don't think of you.
There are.

And what is writing for?

Is any love worth speaking ever spoken?
If one loves but sees who one loves
with a life, with another lover, with different interests and opinions,
and one does not want to clash with this wonderful creature,
cannot clash, cannot bring one's self to do so despite knowing
one would with any other person ...
words fail ... cannot express ...
one fails ... cannot surrender to the daily rituals of self and wonderful lover,
cannot love in those circumstances, yet fears the loss of love.
Perhaps ... hates oneself to much to impose?
Are we still dealing with that at forty?
We speak of love to seduce.
We speak of love because we half believe it,
because we felt it a moment ago and want to communicate it fresh,
though it's no longer felt, to get it through this other's mind
that, yes, we feel this way,
that, yes, we are swept up in these moments, buried in the waves,
that we brace ourselves against walls, my dear.
I'm speaking to you, dear reader.
You are a character here. [49 | 50]
How does one diagram the 18 states of love and their dozens of subsets
on paper, except by gesturing toward them, by exploring?
But explorations come at a price,
paid in pains buried deep.
How do you say anything -- anything -- and (feel like you) mean it?

"you'll never need to be alone again,"
I'm promised by an advertisement of flashing smiling models,
a video note complete with phone # sent right to me at home,
a promise of an end to solitude, end to loneliness,
to depression and masturbation fantasies that I feel loved
by a woman on her back,
her head in my crotch out of love, her soft breasts gliding over me,
nipples sliding across skin because she knows:
knows that it pleases me,
knows the depression it eases, the melancholy it assuages,
knows the temptation she provides to a lover, an artist, a sensitive
whose life is about writing and accomplishment
wants to give me a comfortable home, a base of solace in her mouth
because I'm haunted at three a.m. by past loves and lost hours

and failure and doubt and mourning.

And, because, with her, it's true.
Four thousand or so lines of masturbation fantasy,
of trying to find the word for the feeling
when a woman goes down on you, simple love on her face,
caressing you, loving you, beautiful,
and you know you're loved and see devotion eternal and fierce,
stoic to you, to life, to self,
to want and all but seeing you smile
and it's real, real, real.

Are people with multiple personalities
who write notes to each other to communicate,
learning of what the others in this body are doing,
personalities with different skills, memories, even diseases,
possessed by different souls,
the body a timeshare in the Bahamas,
then in New York, Chicago,
east side, west side?
Does one get the thrill of cheating when Suzanne the schoolgirl
takes over, and she's so convincing in her performance?
Is this not rape? Is this not a heaven for pedophiles?

Let us be honest, open up, and kill our parents,
cut off our genitals, get restraining orders
against our hearts, our families, the drugs on [50 | 51]
our nose, the anxiety when a hero
stands to leave and we want to help him
carry his stuff but he says to stuff it
and the voices continue, a line-up of
multiples personalities, one man standing there,
reading for numbers one through five,
fined for seven interfering. These are the
deadly sins but let us not forget
the virtues as our cell phones spur
our electronic buffalo, the word on which
all works of art end
Off to Buffalo, the striving for an end
(a higher end? Raise your ass, lower the neck,

my hands pushing on your nape, holding your breasts, real, real, real, on the page, dear lover)

a heart full of jealousy if not worship
and my cock the temple, humiliation due thanks

for enforcing this Gnostic love,

deny the world, dear friends, but
I'm not feeling very well,
lull, lull, lull, down the throat

You want to belong, to feel at peace, at one with self and other,
to feel belongingness, as one does in accessing one's soul and

knowing the gods,

to feel a part of something bigger than yourself,

more important than yourself,

something moving and wonderful that to it mountains are nothing.
And yet you cringe at the thought of belonging,

this programmed individualism,

staunch, that makes you feel weak if you belong to

someone, something,

to any movement but individualism, feminism,

the irony not escaping you

but neither in your control. This cringing is an illness. Break me of it,
you should beg. Tear my soul of it, humiliate and use this body,

rid me of it.

You belong to me. If not this poetry, this world-changing agenda,

this god-to-be

bigger than yourself? It is bigger than me.
I long for this humiliation, for sacrifice to this god-to-be, for whom
mountains are nothing, an illusion to be controlled

by a half-waking dreamer.

I hear the wind blowing the leaves on concrete three stories below
as I see you lounging on me after mid-day blow job,

contented by my moans. [51 | 52]

because she knows she can only be a comfort, a bliss amidst sadness
in a sad world,
whose life she fits herself to like her pussy to my manhood,

"Tear out my soul," she begged with violence.
"You'll find it at the bottom of my pussy."

Purgation, this world, purgation.
Not quite hell, though sometimes confused with same.
Some day, somehow, I'll find my heaven.
I imagine it in my dreams.
There there is heaven.
I dream, therefore I have.
I am, therefore I suffer.
I was, therefore I have not.
To imagine is a dangerous thing:
to know the possible makes the present that much more hellish.
And you beside me, my dear, makes it all academic.
So why write?
Because I inflated you with hot air,
and, you being done, I have no other means of ventilation.
There's something profound in that about poetics,
I firmly, firmly, pussy-bendingly firmly believe.

The problem with these new laser mouses
is too much lubricant; I can't feel anything.
(Not that the alternative is unproblematic.)

Men with their dicks out, masturbating with hand,
ragged, stroking. Gods, what a bizarre sight,
enough to see the whole male anatomy as strange beyond comprehension.
Thank the gods I didn't learn to masturbate like that
and can't bring myself to orgasm doing so.

Is this a primer for potential lovers, à la Nira / Sussa?
An epic journey of the reader through expectation, disappointment,
and misunderstanding to the heaven of union with the author?
And is this not fundamentally about reading itself,
about coitus with the author, the artist, with sex and life itself?
Am I not teaching you how to read?
And were you not illiterate, or near-illiterate, before?

You lick my armpit, your tongue stimulating every hair,
sliding in that converse space, tasting my sweat,
that agile, cleaning, flickering, gliding tongue, [52 | 53]
la langue en français, and here is literature, here is language,
as you slide that strong soft beast across by body and swallow my sex,
this guttural language produced deep in the throat.
Let me place my hands, my artists' hands, all over your body,
hold your smooth ass in my palms as I hammer you,
hold your head forward as I bite your passive neck,
my little thing, this nape, the sexiest part of a woman's anatomy,
the indention of the spine, those curves, let me control these with my hands,
force your legs up and your head down with my hands,
and let you place your tongue, your submissive tongue,
cleaning like a cat's, mon chat, a little pussy cat
serving, beautiful, loved, bliss-delivering.

Let's fuck up your plumbing.

I want to hear you moan in pain.
I want to fuck you until you're on the edge of death
and asking in weak voice for your life to be spared,
more letting me know than asking
after half a day of being fucked like there's no tomorrow,
today, or others in all the world, this bed, this floor,
this sadomasochistic landscape once known as a room.

So this former girlfriend calls me and I drop everything.
She's upset after all. What is this loyalty? What is this nonsense?
This allegiance to women who didn't even give me sex.

There's nothing worse than a fiancé at a wedding
dressed in white
when everyone knows she's fucked half the town,
or three friends over the years --
it's a difference of degree,
like killing three or a thousand.

SCREW this dating a porn star business.
I want a virgin, young and youthful,
worshipful and lithe,
limping for days after being fucked,
learning from this, taking the point (so to write).

Keep it coming.

There's little more beautiful
or more tragic
than a perfectly enthralling woman
with a Japanese katana sticking out of her pussy. [53 | 54]
It doesn't have to be sharpened --
it's just the aesthetic effect.

I don't know that I'm in the mood to fuck --
but, gods, the slightest lick of oral sex,
that feeling of wet pussy as it's first penetrated,
and very quickly I'm there, in the moment,
the feeling too good to consider otherwise.

It's my birthday. You'd think
someone, after three and a half years of celibacy,
broken only by a one night with an ex-girlfriend,
still of stunning beauty but resistant to performing oral sex all of a sudden,
and some incredibly poor throat action followed by horrible,
not even remotely satisfying sex that I stopped before orgasm,
so far from orgasm, a cunt dry as a wasteland,
followed by her emotional tirade and faked suicide attempt,
then three weeks of total breakdown on my part --
you'd think that after three and a half years
of loneliness, of isolation, of despair, despair,
that someone would have brought me a woman, a woman,
some young thing who'd like a smart and charming,
if sad and slightly maddened,
artist.
You'd think.
Or maybe you wouldn't.
But I'd have thought that somewhere in this life,
somewhere in all those days,
it would have once been easy.

Maybe it's just that I need to get laid.
Maybe that's why I'm so depressed.
Maybe that's why I'm so fucked up all the time.
Maybe that's why I write.

Gods, just to have an ass like that,
tits like that, thighs like that, lips like that, legs like that
in my bed, at my disposal. Just to have it,
maybe in a desk drawer somewhere,
pull her out when I need it. A little pussy
to help the medicine go down.
Boss talks down to you, a little pussy.
Sexy woman doesn't look your way, a little pussy.
See that punk, richer than you and half as smart?
A little pussy.
Disposable, but reliable. [54 | 55]
$24.95. A perfect world.

This poem grows like a penis as you go through it.
And not only that: it'll fuck you. Watch out.

You, naked on your back.
I want to quit, I want to leave.
But then there is you,
naked, lying on your back.

sex slave? Nice but not enough
this isn't a game --
or it is but the stakes are incredibly high

freakshows:
women with 3 breasts,
pussies instead of mouth, armpits, outer thighs, indention

between the tits, heels, back of the head, bottom of the neck

a pussy factory

... and the feeling of a bead of sweat
trickling down your balls like a tongue as you lie on your side.
Why does no one write about that? How many times
in the human record has that luscious sensation,
that combination of unsatisfying tickle and pleasant titillation,
reward for actions just past, been mentioned?

Gods, why have I not fucked a dancer?
They have the figure I desire, so slim, so lithe,
a body malleable to reach positions otherwise unthinkable,
and a sense of discipline from their training that could suit well.
Not to mention that they're young.
This seems a tragedy to me, a grave tragedy
that needs to be rectified but probably never will.
I hope my non-dancer future lovers will understand this.

Stanzas 36, 22, 36 -- check them out.
Poems within poems, measured out, patterned at different lengths,
the entire epic measured like music, one pattern over another,
an elaborate meta-pattern designed to produce in the reader
consciousness, the rhythm of cathedral music,
though this is a cathedral of the muse, acting like a Aphrodite.

a pussy, spread by a dozen different dicks,
a dozen different men's semen floating around inside,
gobs of dishonor, infection, honor-eradication blended with her body. [55 | 56]

... aghast at such an epic.
I stretch my quill to write it.
Wandering the country, writing epigrams in the Greek hills,
I found my stomach wanting. And so I approached the city gates,
adorned with green ivy, moist with dew, that by themselves
did spread wide at my touch. Hungry, I went from street to street,
looking for a snatch. I ran into a man who had been engorged by a bull.
His woman stood nearby, on her knees, groveling for grace
before her gods, letting out for him a deep moan. His blood was on her
dress, looking as if she was bleeding. And there, amidst that
dreary scene, I saw a flower beside her, ignored but bloody
from her flailing arms. Her mouth was bloody too, crimson handprints
on alabaster flesh, lips painted bright as in a whorehouse
or a Hollywood movie. I felt a sudden contempt for this wretched scene,
for her loose demeanor at this blood wedding, like an African
holding a towel marked in red from aloft his balcony
to the crowds below, for this country display.

For all of my seductions, she did me vex,
Doing no more than suck upon my thumb,
As surrogate, while below I did flex.
Starving, I offered to pay any sum;
When she refused, by force I took her ...,
Beat her, and made her take my ... .

You've got such a dirty mind! What perversions
enter your mind with such quickness! Would it help
if I said I had tried to seduce her with a piece of fruit?
That she was a lesbian? That, in anger, I tracked down
the girl who was her ex -- and, in a moment of weakness,
beat her? That, out of frustration, exhausted from courting
her, from her refusals to take a simply plumb, I forced it into
her hand? I was no saint, but hardly would have done what
your mind concocted! One can never justify one's thoughts.

God, what an ass.
Not said by some idiot in a bar, or whose natural environment is same,
but by a sophisticate, a literate, a sensitive who notes the aesthetics
and can locate her accent in terms of both class and region,
and can, more importantly, respond as one should,
but by one who sees the Gnostic implications of a tight,
perfectly curved piece
of art built for fucking.
God, what tits. [56 | 57]
Those little flaps of skin, so absurd, so unnecessary, so beautiful,
built for aesthetic reasons because beauty is practical,
because even the dunderheads have some biologically programmed
art appreciation, though they state it with ale on the breath
and saliva from the mouth, with little things between their legs
that fuck when blood goes into them, as if form follows function,
never knowing the joy of aesthetic looking,
the combination of nearness and distance, being detached and moved
simultaneously, by those bubbles of soft flesh of so many shapes,
all with gravitas, all with those nodules for direct current,
for twisting and kissing-biting, those soft weight in the hand
too much for the mind to grasp.

A kiss goodnight bourgeois?

We can't pretend that women enjoy sex the way men do.
Two-thirds or so of American women, with all this propaganda
telling women to like sex like men, to fuck as if they had dicks,
to play, prefer to clean the house than to have sex.
Let no one say this was skewed, in error by too much:
we get the same results every time we ask, fairly and anonymously,
and probably the majority, if not almost all,
of the one-third claiming to enjoy sex more than cleaning the house,
say so because they're supposed to enjoy sex,
because we've had far too many decades of nonsense
encouraging women to think like they had dicks
so that they're embarrassed for not fucking around
and making their slits define themselves.
In the wake of such a tidal wave, as women talk of orgasms on TV,
as if most women cared, as if a man could say "it's nice, but I don't expect one
or even want one every time" ... .
So let's cut the crap.
Women use sex. They use it to feel desirable, to feel good at pleasing
(always central for them; a good thing when directed well
and a catastrophe otherwise), to get back at mother and father and lover,
and maybe feel a little physical pleasure to soothe in the belief
that one is desirable, good at pleasing, getting revenge.

Let's all fuck Madonna.

The armored woman staunch did blow.
Standing before her, the man armed with art;
His long spear to her like death did dart;
He thrust violent, deep into her body fit. [57 | 58]
Through damp tissue his spear did wend
And in her a bloody passage it did rend,
Its head resting, twisting in her heart.
Where soft flesh was, his blade made slit.
Her flesh transmuted, he did spend.

oh, fuck it all: you won't listen anyway, dear reader,
too afraid to challenge your programming to be a reader
to acknowledge what you feel
that there's something beautiful in impassioned surrender, even to harm,
to what's frankly condemnable,
that women's fantasies are different than men's
as surely as men are hot-wired differently,
that this difference is beautiful
why don't we apply to gender what we do to race?
Where is multigenderism, with its celebration of difference,
its interest in and celebration of the strange in the other gender and in our own?
With its refusal to pretend a single gender is possible
any more than a single culture?
PAY ATTENTION
to this poem, to yourselves.
Think honestly about it.
Your parents aren't watching you fuck anyway.
We've got a generation of people trying to act against their inclinations
with the belief in and participation in the attempt to create a monogender,
as if some don't bleed between their legs,
as if we all have children and we all grow an instrument for penetration,
for invasion, for violation, for self-gratification.
As if we're not equivocating constantly on matters like visual arousal,
in a desperate an ultimately pathetic attempt
to pretend, against all obvious observation and evidence,
that a mob-mentality arousal equals hot-wired private near-orgasmic response.
"Women are wonderful" -- except that women,
according to the same people,
don't exist as a separate group: it's the monogender
of slaves to the state, to capital, that these people desire.
A world in which a woman has the same salary and perks [58 | 59]
while taking breaks now and then to have children,
and can bring her children to breast-feed at the office,
like any competent professional.
Do we really imagine egalitarianism hasn't run its course?
Do we really imagine that, once we declare femaleness a psychobiological handicap
in the workplace, in most "masculine" realms,
that the sane response is a massive, untenable social structure of hiring quotas and
scholarships and day cares and pills to regulate menstrual emotions and
penalizing censorship of words that make women uncomfortable and
more than the GNP of most nations devoted to figuring out how to recast what we do
so that women can do it all just as well, with the assumption that they can
no matter the situation, and
a million such artifices to prop women up as men, with the bonus of having wombs?
Will we do the same for men? Are men who fail at parenting their children,
like women who fail at work,
failing only because of social programming that keeps them from accessing this
utopian monogender? Isn't this all a bit like the woman
who climbs on top of the man and imagines,
as she drives the knife into her and out of her
and grinds it around inside her,
that she's in control? In the sense of choosing to be penetrated, violated, fucked
and manipulating how it happens, of course. But this is like a nation
manipulating another to launch a nuclear strike against it. Perhaps impressive,
but indirect: the action itself argues against the feeling of "control" and "dominance."
In the East, there's a tradition that sees wives' staying with their husbands who hit them
to be intensely spiritual for their selflessness. And one can hold this viewpoint and still
hate the act one is responding spiritually to. Does one hate Gandhi
or Martin Luther King for not leaving their nations, not ending their relationship
with their governments? Or does one admire how they dealt with it? Spirituality has
usually been identified as submission to God, and, in this Eastern tradition, women are
spiritually better because they are more naturally [59 | 60] submissive. Who is better? Why are
we so obsessed with control? What are our assumptions?
Tear down your assumptions about control being good or easy.
Tear down, I say, your assumptions about egalitarianism,
as if a man confined to a wheelchair and a long-distance runner
could ascend stairs just as well, if we only deconstructed our social system
that tells them otherwise. Egalitarianism is opposed to beauty.
As we do not limit our cultural canvas to one color ethnically, let us not sexually.
We may transgress, but we must have a definition to transgress against.
We have notions of African-American culture and we accept them as generalizations.
Why can't we do the same for women and men?
If you strip away the cultural baggage, you don't get egalitarianism,
with everyone of the same capabilities and inclinations.
You get gender differences beyond what the industrial age has repressed,
beyond what the TV and the internet mask. For us to look at societies that strictly segregate

men

and

women

and conclude that this means society works to create gender differences in our culture as well,
by and large, is horseshit. Let us extrapolate from the most basic gender differences:

... the hips that launched a thousand ships?
... in the concentration camp of your bed ...
... luscious, luscious, ludicrous ...

-- a personal epic of sexual discovery,
but that advocates in its very form
the position that all sexual discovery is internal,
mental, psychological, and that such discovery occurs
on a daily basis, encompasses ALL.
Its claims to objectivity must be taken in this context:
in this tale of a psychosexual Odysseus,
all is not only sexual but subjective.
All sexual thought is solipsistic.

the irresistibility of the erection [60 | 61]

spread, spread, spread,
down on your back, legs up, now, now, now,
you're going to be fucked.

"I've forgiven your little indiscretion":
the sweetest words a woman can say to a man,
as he thinks about the feeling of their pussies, wet on his cock,
only sweeter when followed, sweetly, nicely, as she strokes you,
"I hope you enjoyed her. I hope her pussy brought you pleasure;
I hope you came well and softly in her, her legs propped
under
your shoulders. I hope you liked the feel of her soft young tits,
younger than mine. I hope she blew you better than me,
better than you could imagine," said as she slides your cock
into her mouth, desperate to give you whatever she can,
followed,
nicely,
by your orgasm.

And here I am, in Purgatory, only now realizing I've been
picking up the fragments, trying to piece them back together,
like Isis with her lover, one part not found, one part not found.

And what is Purgatory but an appendix -- to life, to worldly suffering and
(f)olding, (m)olding, (s)melting.

Enough, enough, spread your legs.
I don't want to write this.
I just want your cunt obeying the whims of my dick
like the dust does the wind,
swirling.

Does Casanova Columbus lead me up to the gates of Paradise
or does Plato? How like Petrarch.
I don't even know who my tour guide is.

[end page 61]