Today's poet

[Alf]

Its Saturday night so I should be able to get away with posting this one

For Desire

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the love who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are left off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how ****king good I look

Kim Addonizio

Quite a gal

[Hes]

Crikey!! That's quite some poem Alf....I was just about to post something miserable as nobody was around but I wouldn't want to ruin the saturday night mood!

[freckle]

Oh my golly gosh! How LUSH!!!!! and i mean LUSH!!!!! was that poem Alf! there are so many potential signatures in there especially the line" I want to lie down somewhere and suffer for love until it nearly kills me" .....oh I am all of a quiver...well I would be if this website wasn't taking soooooooooo long to load! .....hoping to get back on here with some verse laters but thanks for that one Alfie :-)

[freckle]

Here I Love You

Here I love you
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

Pablo Neruda

[Hes]

Lovely Neruda choice Freckle! I'm thinking of digging out his Odes to Common Things again and reading the one about wooly socks as its so cold in this house right now!

[Hes]

I am beginning to wonder what love is all about...there seems to be a lot of references in poetry, and the like, to wanting to die for love, going mad for love and general suffering whilst being in love. Call me a lightweight, but isn't love supposed to be a healthier experience?!

[Hes]

and so to Kamala Das....it's been a while after all:

Flotsam

We were homeless, he and I, floating ones
Who recognize swiftly another of the tribe
By that certain hunger in the eye, a slight
Narrowing, for, although brimming with a desert sun,
It fancies it sees an oasis; the mirage
Greenly reflected in each lonely cornea.
And, so together we stumbled so clumsily
Into lust, But pushing his urgent limbs away
I fought to regain my body's poise till he cried
I love you, you've no need to be afraid of me.
When at last he left, scolded, sent away, alone
On the white desert of my sheets I wondered if
I should have fought at all to save this dubious
Asset, my aloneness, my terrible aloneness.

[Hes]

The Stoat

serpentine slinker
stopping with a sloe eyed stare
black tipped tail twitching

[Mossdog]

Here I Love You

Here I love you
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

Pablo Neruda

Fabulous - and a new PN for me.

[Derby Tup]

New to me too. Fabulous verse