Gifts of Flesh

Each time is like 
The first date
I dress to entice
Paint my face
To attract attention
From the balcony

Stage fright
Though I’ve played
This role before
Adrenaline flowing
Quivering muscles
As I strip you down
But this isn’t a show

Excitement sparking
Like thrown glitter
While I tie you down
Letting my long hair
Brush your bare chest

Ropes straps cuffs
Duct tape sizzling from the roll
Gas mask cinched tight
Immobilized
Cocooned
Encased
Totally at my whim
Not just your pleasure
Your very life
Held in these
Delicate fingers
Squeezing the hose

Do you love me?
Or is this unrequited
Like the air 
Growing stale
In your lungs

There’s a look in your eyes
When the animal panics
A satisfying pop
As your body spasms
Drowning in latex and nylon
You are no longer alive
No longer a person
Just perfect slave meat

But you should know
This isn’t a game
It’s not about pain
It’s not about power
It’s not about perversion
Because when you fully submit
When you fear me
When you love me
When you do as I say
I am utterly your slave

Chime & Thunder

it’s the year you’re reincarnated in Kim Deal’s voice 
the makeup on your eyes is sunburst
our days a bratty buzz bin of melancholy
of crop top cannonball     of pixies in the air

the double denim sky hangs sticky at the fair.
It’s the year you’re reincarnated in Kim Deal’s voice
da ah da da da like colourpop, like strawberry sandpaper 
picked with Dunlop     of chime & thunder at the fair.             

We wait for the last splash but it never     whatever. 
We’re analogue kids passing through digital rain
glasstron at Metreon, vodka in Tupperware
cuckoo with the reggae bong      dancing in our underwear.

You were all nerve     all wave     marshal stack
now I wait in the car, scavenge decades like perfect disasters.
It’s the year you’re reincarnated in Kim Deal’s voice
& I’m still tinkering with the vocal effects

Poet from the alleged sex tape

I sleep nervous
with a mask on
Showered
inky pen
shiny

So when I get the dream
they will know me
and the mask
will keep
reality
from interrupting
going down
on the scene

I haven’t had the dream just yet
I don’t know how many nights
but I prepare

Maybe it will come
like a couplet comet
Streak past
the sonnet’s subconscious
Blasting
Intense end-stopped line ecstasy
Oh it will
Oh I will
when my time comes

So I am standing now below
some bright lights

Tacky sets with couches
Some beautiful Spanish visions walk in front
Super hot ones drinking on the sides
incredible female limber liberated voices
in the back

I say “Welcome..Not my first time, but…”
I pull the mask off
clear my throat
They pull out a video camera
old one with the tape
I clear my throat again
Nerves
They surround me
Maybe we live stream

I am potent
I am ready
I am strong
I am not ever asleep
I am ready for the exposure
all over 

Then
It’s hard
I drink some water
I get the timing right
The movement
The rhythm
A real talent I hear
from the room
where the pipes of inspiration are banging
heats on strong

The passion personification 
is all over the place
Sliding into lines
curves pure and punctuated hard 
No shooting blank verses

Even if it’s fake sometimes
Howling
Other times
Soft
Tender positioning
Thrusts of dirty
censored words
Beautiful
forbidden whispers
Then after like over 2 minutes for sure
Silence

Cut-up 
Silence 
I gave them my whole everything
They even clapped
as the help cleaned up
I felt great
bowed my head
finished up

Some things were passed around
everyone lit cigarettes
No one was asleep not one second
It was great marketing
and  publicity
and mind blowing
legendary industry
though cheap  

When I wake
I fantasize
of watching the video tape
Rewind past to the meaty parts
Fast forward to the laughs
just like if it really happened

All there documented too
The greatest fucking 
reading
of all time

The Medieval Mind

Medieval man, enshrouded in a pall
of gloom, blamed Woman for Man’s vice.
Her burning lust provoked Man’s fall,
Eve’s vulva opening up another Paradise.
Henceforth, all life began in pain and shame.
Grotesque depictions then appeared,
Sheela-na-gigs, the medieval name
for twelfth-century carvings to be feared,
above doors and windows, entries
to European cathedrals and churches
as if they were horrific sentries
looking down from lofty perches,
with gaping vulvas of enormous size.
Some think of it as magical protection,
though it was hard to visualise.
The aim: to avoid Eve’s dread ‘infection’,
to ward off the contagion of Woman’s sin
(as reflected in Corbeau’s ‘Origin
of the World’ in the Musée d’Orsay)
to ensure no man would go astray.

Three Way

I had a dream –
I was in a three way with Sylvia Plath
and Anne Sexton.
Nirvana played on the radio.
Ernest Hemingway stood in the darkest corner
of the room.
He was holding a camera
but he was filming himself and not us.
The camera was shaped like a shotgun.

Sylvia fondled me
as Anne stroked the hair
on my head and on my chest.
I sat there on the bed with my hands at my sides,
too afraid to touch them.
I closed my eyes as Sylvia blew into my left ear,
Anne my right.
I was as hard as a rock.
My body was tensely still.

Then,
in unison, their four lovely lips whispered to me,
“What are you waiting for?”

The Only Daddy I Wanna Know

I remember when I called him Daddy
Smiled pretty all day so he’d spank me
I just gave in to the joke of authority
Ha! Forgot truth: No limits invade ME

Get out of my lighthouse;
the noisy-nitpick louse
Don’t need orders or opinions to Shine
Pack your gas-lighting dragging behind

What you’re putting out is putting You out
Cosmic cord-cutting for your piss n’ pout
Tried to transfer to me your gutless doubt
What you’re putting out is putting You out

Gimme that High for my Low; hearts aglow
Balance the beat, turn off the shit-show
That’s the only Daddy I ever wanna blow
a kiss. The only Daddy I wanna know…

Poetry vs.

She wanted to talk about my poem,
whether it worked with symbols
or something subtler. I mouthed
some inanity about what metaphor
means to me. How could I say,
instead, that I wanted to see her
naked, her blond limbs, her glossy
thighs. We talked a little bit more
about the poem. “It’s not often I
get to ask the actual author,” she
gushed. I didn’t feel actual. I felt
like a shitheel. But, reader, listen.
Her eyes were like the blue the sky
unveils only in early morning. And,
up close, she seemed to be made of
cake. I went home and she went home.
I tried to write new poems. She found
herself thinking about fucking and 
called to her husband in the next room.

Lobster Bob 

I was sitting at the bar listening to mark 
telling 
me about his roommate, lobster bob. 
“he brings home a different 
whore
three or four times a week.
“bartrolls. nothing but bartrolls.” 

“still,” I said, “three or four times
a week? it’s not easy to pick up 
anything three or four times
a week.”  

“yeah it is,” said mark. “you find the grossest 
chick in the place… 
at 2.a.m. I mean the grossest… 
that’s what he
looks for, and gets…”

as he was saying this, lobster bob came sidling out 
of the bathroom. 
he was about 45, with a loose-hanging
aloha shirt and a limp mop 
of lord Fauntleroy hair framing his bloated
pink face. He looked a bit like a lobster, 
but that’s not
how he got the name. 

we watched as he nuzzled up to some lady 
at least ten years 
his senior, her broad beam spilling over
the barstool.

“and look at him now,” mark went on. 
“he’s at it again… 
the disgusting
fuck… and i’m gonna have to listen 
to it through the wall.”

we both 
shook our heads. I was 
laughing… lobster bob 
was more 
of a man
than either of us
could ever be.

Sertraline

It’s bad and it will get worse—
this is the certainty.

Then
it will get better—
this the assumption,
the hope, the gamble.

On salary day
I spend the night 
drinking at a sports pub
in Newcastle.

I’m here for work.
It’s freezing up here
and working as a cladder
has never sucked harder.

I bet almost all my salary
2.350£ on Leicester to win
after they are already winning 
1-0 and with 1.95 odds
I’m looking at doubling
my money.

It ends with them losing
3-4 and getting back to my travel
lodge a homeless man asks me for money
and nodding him away from me
I think if I’d only won that bet
I’d probably take him by the hand 
to an ATM and really make his night.

Looking at people walk around life 
with seamless easiness 
has always been a source 
of great envy in me.

Always have felt that I’ve walked
in a quicksand the whole time
and the more I tried to keep up
the more I sunk.

The more they kept getting ahead.

Autopilot doesn’t work.
Stirring through every second 
of life manually is laborious work.

An unforgiving loneliness
monolithic in size and grandiose.

It’s like you’re that astronaut 
standing on the moon 
looking back at the earth 
getting hit by a meteor 
like an AK bullet going 
through someone’s chest

Nobody else but you left

And only for a short while longer.

Catwalk of Spies

The Agency neither confirms nor denies
While booking its models
On the catwalk of spies

That the catwalk of intel is a runway of lies
And everyone poses
On the catwalk of spies

Catwalk of whispers, catwalk of sighs
Catwalk of secrets
Catwalk of spies

Cover is a microskirt flaunting your thighs
With sheer blouse unbuttoned
On the catwalk of spies

And truth’s a pair of pumps, too small by one size
Make sure you don’t stumble
On the catwalk of spies

Covert action is shadow that brings out your eyes
And black ops make you slimmer
On the catwalk of spies

Spy dust is blush the makeup artist applies
And everyone’s airbrushed
On the catwalk of spies

Agents are items you accessorize
You wear each one proudly
On the catwalk of spies

But when the big designer your portfolio buys
And you make that cold read
On the catwalk of spies

In that moment your dress falls, and you realize
Strutting forth naked
On the catwalk of spies

That the passage through which unto light we all rise
That runway of spirit
Is a catwalk of spies

Catwalk of whispers, catwalk of sighs
Catwalk of eternity
Catwalk of spies