Her slit is my sign.
~ ~ ~
You lie there naked, but no more naked than at the doctor’s.
Your wound no more naked than your knees.
As if it’s a habit. My own body, I’ve come to see
with different eyes. As if, after all these years,
the rejection no longer applies.
~ ~ ~
Your palm glides more softly, you’re starting
to get it. Your breasts are fuller too
after three months of caresses. The dance
of your hip finally echoes our first nights
with all those teething problems.
~ ~ ~
Close to her, I think: our story is
cold metal, something for half
a day a week, a passing madness.
And I’m just the table leg a bitch
pisses on out of longing for something else.
~ ~ ~
Getting dressed. Pressing what I’ve worshipped
into stretch panties. Arranging your segments.
You raise your foot & I think
you think I’m a part of you.
Something like an ingrown toenail.
~ ~ ~
“More. Don’t stop. Faster!” No, she didn’t groan
it, she swore, “Oh, God, oh, God damn it!”
And then, “What have you done
to my face? It looks years younger!”
And then, “Oh, boy, if you ever cheat on me!”
~ ~ ~
It’s finished. Adieu. Hidden under make-up.
Or rather, did it ever exist? Or is there
a corpse still lying here between the sheets,
looking like the two of us and panting still?
Her mouth: my lock.
~ ~ ~
The smell of her cunt and arse confuse her,
the taste in my mouth shames her.
She’s not that fish, she thinks, with piss and sweat,
but some other animal, deodorised and in another land.
That’s why she’s sometimes hated by her glands.
~ ~ ~
Her name which you say and yawning
spell out over and over again, snowed under.
Her name which you groan
until the neighbour calls the police.
Her name which you swallow / like she swallows her pill.
~ ~ ~
When she sleeps I open
her finest pages and read
the wiring of her soft,
warm television—
a circuit from her to her.
~ ~ ~
Ha-ha! I had a heart, I swear it,
trembling like any other. And chattering.
Truly, it lay there waiting for her.
— She took her iron and placed
it on my heart and pressed and pressed.
~ ~ ~
“Do you want to?”—“If you do, so do I.”
“Then I don’t want to.”—“Me neither.”
Who wanted to? Who wanted to?
When tenderness is in the majority,
there’s no one to open the door.
~ ~ ~
“He took my virginity,” she said.
“Every day I’m scared of him,” she said.
“I can never trust him,” she said.
“I sob for hours at a time,” she said and sobbed,
“and you, you’re just my lover.”
from Figurative [1973]
Five Polaroids of Jesus Christ
1
A stick insect
with something feminine around the ribs
an iris in his midriff.
(Death is in my hipbone, the left,
my jaws already calcified;
once I was as bright as a flower,
as bitter as blossom.)
Mutant. Transformed from man
to mantis by paternal wrath.
He is edible, digestible
like the crickets of the sea.
The sun burns him
to blisters and shreds
and ash that drifts to the water.
2
At the village pump he let the children
play with his crown of thorns.
He pointed at a comet and said,
“Look, my father’s winking at you.”
Then his mount grew restless.
“I would like,” he said, “the greatest sinner
among you to take a bite out of my ear.”
But they kept staring at his girlish hair
and sullenly he spurred his pony on
across the crushed-ice sand.
3
One of his manifestations preached
the following: “Hey, followers!
What’s going on? People,
God help us, with the hots for purity,
want to replace gold with white!
They want to shuck off their senses,
unsullied by minerals, changing
the gold of thought
into bland half-hearted white!
As if my father’s hair
was not curled and gilded!
As if indulgences and repentance
earn you immortality!
Forget it.
God is in gold alone
and gold is the only reason
for an almost reasonable smile.”
4
“Burdened with crown and armour,
wrapped in my tentacles,
braggart and beggar,
I preached mercy and yearning.
I could bear no emptiness.
“Now I no longer turn my cheek.
I stink like a bed full of lovers
and stiff as a ram
I sometimes dance with fury.
“I only pray when I shit
(and no longer as the Son of Someone).
(What’s more, the Slut is dead.)