Poetry

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The Passive Voice :: Rafael Campo

Imagine why a man likes being fucked.
Imagine how my cock likes being sucked.
Imagine making love to me, my friend.

In English class, my teacher told us not
To use the passive voice; “it’s weak,” he said.
There was an older man who sometimes knocked

At my back door; I’d think of him in bed
And wonder if he’d like to make it break.
Imagine making love to him, my friend,

Until your mother finds your door unlocked.
Imagine what it’s like slowly to bend
Beneath another man’s gigantic cock–

The pleasures of the asshole aren’t discerned
By many English teachers (mine was like
The handsome man I’d like to love instead)–

Imagine telling him. Of course, he’s shocked,
But after several weeks a note he sends:
“Imagine why a man likes being fucked,”

It says, and inexplicably so sad,
“Imagine how my cock likes being sucked.”
In high school, no one seems to understand

This kind of love. It could be called dumb luck
Or disappointment, what happened in his bed;
Imagining why men like being fucked,

After his gentle, upright cock, I spent
The night in tears while in his arms I rocked.
Imagine making love to me, my friend.
Imagine why a man likes being fucked.

— By Rafael Campo

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Asylum :: Rafael Campo

Demented underneath the moon, I watch
The street conduct electric sparks tonight,
These cars, their headlights, energy in flight–

Skyscrapers precarious as men in heels.
This night, it seems more glamorous than real.
Demented underneath the moon, around

Another corner, ten men beat the pan
Of shiny, pooling blood another man
Has made for them, his whole life’s work: these men

Identified another queer. The moon
Demented underneath fleeting stars,
Demented, shining on speeding cars,

Dissolves upon my tongue. It tastes like force.
It tastes like blood, saliva, teeth. I’d curse,
But I’m demented. Underneath the moon,

The moonlight makes perfection out of me.
The men are beating on their drum. Their drums
Are poverty and ignorance, so painfully

Made lucid. Once, I really saw the moon.
It hurt. And underneath it all the world
Was busy, furious, bent to the loom.

— By Rafael Campo

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Proust in Bed :: J. D. McClatchy

The Paris Review – “Proust in Bed”.

Twisted and hilarious, poem about Proust, read by poet. Who could ask for anything more?

[Originally appeared in Issue 125, Winter 1992, of The Paris Review.]

“Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.”

Proust in Bed
– J. D. McClatchey

Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
There was the turkey, the second-best
Chairs, the old chipped washstand, all his dead parents’
Things donated months ago
“To make an unfortunate
Crowd happy” at the Hôtel
Marigny, Albert’s brothel,
Warehouse of desires
And useless fictions-

For one of which he turned to Albert
And nodded, he’d have that one at cards, the soon-
To-be footman or fancy butcher.
He’d rehearsed his questions in the corridor.
Did you kill an animal
Today? An ox? Did it bleed?
Did you touch the blood? Show me
Your hands, let me see how you  . . .
(Judgment Day angel
Here to separate

The Good from the Bad, to weigh the soul . . .
Soon enough you’ll fall from grace and be nicknamed
Pamela the Enchantress or Tool
Of the Trade. Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.)
One after another now,
Doors closed on men in bed with
The past, it was three flights to
His room, the bedroom at last,
The goal obtained and
So a starting-point

For the next forbidden fruit-the taste
Of apricots and ripe gruyère is on the hand
He licks-the next wide-open mouth
To slip his tongue into like a communion
Wafer. The consolation
Of martyrs is that the God
For whom they suffer will see
Their wounds, their wildernesses.
He’s pulled a fresh sheet
Up over himself,

As if waiting for his goodnight kiss
While the naked boy performs what he once did
For himself. It’s only suffering
Can make us all more than brutes, the way that boy
Suffers the silvery thread
To be spun inside himself,
The snail-track left on lilac,
Its lustrous mirror-writing,
The mysterious
Laws drawn through our lives

Like a mother’s hand through her son’s hair . . .
But again nothing comes of it. The signal
Must be given, the small bedside bell.
He needs his parents to engender himself,
To worship his own body
As he watches them adore
Each other’s. The two cages
Are brought in like the holy
Sacrament. Slowly
The boy unveils them.

The votive gaslights seem to flicker.
Her dying words were “What have you done to me?”
In each cage a rat, and each rat starved
For three days, each rat furiously circling
The pain of its own hunger.
Side by side the two cages
Are placed on the bed, the foot
Of the bed, right on the sheet
Where he can see them
Down the length of his

Body, helpless now as it waits there.
The rats’ angry squealing sounds so far away.
He looks up at his mother-touches
Himself-at the photograph on the dresser,
His mother in her choker
And her heavy silver frame.
The tiny wire-mesh trap doors
Slide open. At once the rats
Leap at each other,
Claws, teeth, the little

Shrieks, the flesh torn, torn desperately,
Blood spurting out everywhere, hair matted, eyes
Blinded with blood. Whichever stops
To eat is further torn. The half-eaten rat
Left alive in the silver
Cage the boy-he keeps touching
Himself-will stick over and
Over with a long hatpin.
Between his fingers
He holds the pearl drop.

She leans down over his bed, her veil
Half-lifted, the scent of lilac on her glove.
His father hates her coming to him
Like this, hates her kissing him at night like this.

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The Other Tiger :: J. L. Borges

And the craft that createth a semblance
MORRIS: SIGURD THE VOLSUNG (1876)

I think of a tiger. The gloom here makes
The vast and busy Library seem lofty
And pushes the shelves back;
Strong, innocent, covered with blood and new,
It will move through its forest and its morning
And will print its tracks on the muddy
Margins of a river whose name it does not know
(In its world there are no names nor past
Nor time to come, only the fixed moment)
And will overleap barbarous distances
And will scent out of the plaited maze
Of all the scents the scent of dawn
And the delighting scent of deer.
Between the stripes of the bamboo I decipher
Its stripes and have the feel of the bony structure
That quivers under the glowing skin.
In vain do the curving seas intervene
And the deserts of the planet;
From this house in a far-off port
In South America, I pursue and dream you,
O tiger on the Ganges’ banks.
In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect
That the tiger invoked in my verse
Is a ghost of a tiger, a symbol,
A series of literary tropes
And memories from the encyclopaedia
And not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
That, under the sun or the varying moon,
In Sumatra or Bengal goes on fulfilling
Its rounds of love, of idleness and death.
To the symbolic tiger I have opposed
The real thing, with its warm blood,
That decimates the tribe of buffaloes
And today, the third of August, ’59,
Stretches on the grass a deliberate
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its circumstances
Makes it a figment of art and no creature
Living among those that walk the earth.

We shall seek a third tiger. This
Will be like those others a shape
Of my dreaming, a system of words
A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger
That, beyond the mythologies,
Is treading the earth. I know well enough
That something lays on me this quest
Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on
Seeking through the afternoon time
The other tiger, that which is not in verse.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

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The Vedic Period

He, assuredly, awakes this world, which is a mass of thought. It is thought by Him, and in Him it disappears.

He is that shining form which gives heat in yonder sun and which is the brilliant light in a smokeless fire, as also the fire in the stomach which cooks food. For thus has it been said: “He who is in the fire, and he who is here in the heart, and he who is yonder in the sun–he is one.”

To the unity of the One goes he who knows this.

18. The precept for effacing this [unity] is this: restraint of the breath, withdrawal of the senses, meditation, concentration, contemplation, absorbtion. Such is said to be the sixfold yoga. . . .

30.  . . . Verily, freedom from desire is like the choicest extract from the choicest treasure. For, a person who is made up of all desires, who has the marks of determination, conception, and self-conceit, is bound. Hence, in being the opposite of that, he is liberated. . . .

34.  . . . Samsara [cycle of existence] is just one’s own thought;

With effort he should cleanse it, then.
What is one’s thought, that he becomes;
This is the eternal mystery.

For by tranquility of thought,
Deeds, good and evil, one destroys.
With self serene, stayed on the Self,
Delight eternal one enjoys!

As firmly is the thought of man
Is fixed within the realm of sense–
If thus on Brahman it were fixed,
Who would not be released from bond? . . .

By making mind all motionless,
From sloth and from distraction freed,
When unto mindlessness one comes,
Then that is the supreme estate! . . .

The mind, in truth, is for mankind
The means of bondage and release;
For bondage, if to objects bound;
From objects free–that’s called release! . . .

(VI. 17-18, 30, 34)

[The Upanisads, Maitri Upanisad; from: Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, 1957] . . . .

[I don’t really know what this is; I just found a xeroxed page with “Heidegger” written on it in my desk drawer, and this is what it said.]

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Sugar Magnolia :: Grateful Dead

Sugar Magnolia blossom’s blooming
Head’s all empty and I don’t care
Saw my baby down by the river
Knew she’d have to come up soon for air Continue reading →

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Attics of My Life :: Grateful Dead

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me Continue reading →

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Looks Like Rain :: Grateful Dead

I woke today…
And felt your side of bed
The covers were still warm where you’d been layin’.
You were gone…
My heart was filled with dread.
You might not be sleepin’ here again Continue reading →

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Life Itself is a Quotation


All the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other’s sympathetic consideration. ~ J. M. Thorburn

Continue reading →

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Gravity :: DeWitt Henry

I think of small deaths, a sneeze, an orgasm; how close such seizures are at once to vacancy and to the utter concentration of black holes, pure gravity. At once experience past will, past memory or thought; and an absence too, a non-experience. Comatose, the epileptic fit; no chance to dream. And yet like dreams, I hear Continue reading →

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Love Love Love :: The Mountain Goats

King Saul fell on his sword
when it all went wrong
and Joseph’s brothers sold him down the river
for a song
and Sonny Liston rubbed some Tigerbalm
in his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskolnikov felt sick
but he couldn’t say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim’s twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you’ll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

love love is gonna lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see this
as in a mirror dimley
then we shall see each other
face to face

and way out in Seattle
young Kurt Cobain
snuck out to the garden
put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet
rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
and some flare out with love love love

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No Woman No Cry :: Bob Marley

Said – said – said: I remember when we used to sit In the government yard in

Trenchtown, Oba – obaserving the ‘ypocrites As they would mingle with the good people we meet. Good friends we have, oh, good friends we’ve lost

Along the way. In this great future, you can’t forget your past; So dry your tears, I seh.

No, woman, no cry; No, woman, no cry. ‘Ere, little darlin’, don’t shed no tears: No, woman, no cry.

Said – said – said: I remember when-a we used to sit In the government yard in Trenchtown. And then Georgie would make the fire lights,

As it was logwood burnin’ through the nights. Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,

Of which I’ll share with you; My feet is my only carriage, So I’ve got to push on through. But while I’m gone, I mean:

Everything’s gonna be all right! Everything’s gonna be all right! Everything’s gonna be all right! Everything’s gonna be all right! I said, everything’s gonna be all right-a! Everything’s gonna be all right! Everything’s gonna be all right, now! Everything’s gonna be all right! So, woman, no cry; No – no, woman – woman, no cry. Woman, little sister, don’t shed no tears; No, woman, no cry.

I remember when we used to sit In the government yard in Trenchtown. And then Georgie would make the fire lights,

As it was logwood burnin’ through the nights. Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,

Of which I’ll share with you; My feet is my only carriage, So I’ve got to push on through. But while I’m gone:

No, woman, no cry; No, woman, no cry. Woman, little darlin’, say don’t shed no tears; No, woman, no cry. Eh!

(Little darlin’, don’t shed no tears! No, woman, no cry. Little sister, don’t shed no tears! No, woman, no cry.)

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Upward Over the Mountain :: Iron & Wine

Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body? Continue reading →

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Passing Afternoon :: Iron & Wine

There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms Continue reading →

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The Sea and the Rhythm :: Iron & Wine

Tonight, we’re the sea and the salty breeze
the milk from your breast is on my lips
and lovelier words from your mouth to me
when salty my sweat and fingertips Continue reading →