The Nature of Gothic

I once met a Goth girl in a bar 
who said she was a comic,
yet her deadpan demeanour 
revealed no trace of humour.
She was fun but not really funny.
After a number of drinks—
and a few knowing winks,
she invited me back to her place—
well, I had run out of money. 
Once there, one thing led to another, 
or rather, one thing led to THE other… 

As I was undressing her, 
it gradually dawned on me 
why she referred to herself as a comic.
She didn’t do stand-up or even tell jokes,
she was literally an anatomic, 
graphic novel. Her body, covered 
in a variety of tattoos, told a story 
as she lay, spread out on the bed; 
in fact, several stories,
if you varied the order 
in which her vignettes were read. 

Her left breast portrayed Scylla.
One of the writhing heads was the nipple.
The right one was Charybdis
and that nipple mimicked the ripple 
in the eye of the whirlpool. 
My Goth! A girl with a classics degree!
I was deeply impressed 
when she was undressed
as reading her stories in various ways, 
say, jumping about like the knight’s forays,
in chess, you could follow Aeneas’s route
through her very own silicone valley, 
between Scylla and Charybdis
an experience I had no wish to miss. 
Choosing the bishop’s moves would
produce Jason and the Argonauts’ tale 
and finally, the rook’s moves could
reproduce the story of Odysseus. 
I kid you not. I am being serious.

Below her navel, it got more OT, 
as in ‘over the top’ and Old Testament: 
The figure of Moses held up a sign
that said: “Roll up! Roll up! This way 
to the burning bush!” Here was the shrine
in my Goth’s promised land. 
“I’m on fire,” she said. “Please put it out!”
“Of course,” I replied, “no need to shout.
I’m holding the hose in my hand!”

Turning her over onto her front 
produced an eye-popping scene: 
the whole of her back 
represented a classic foxhunt
with the hounds heading south
toward her …. nether regions.
“D’you ken John Peel with his coat so gay,
“D’you ken John Peel at the break of day,”
I hummed to myself.

Several other red-coated men
mounted on stallions were
galloping down to her crack 
with a pack of hounds in full cry. 
The weary young fox, naturally sly,
had entered the crevice
of her plump rump, 
leaving only its brush 
sticking out like a rush.
(Even Aesop wasn’t able
to write a fable about an ass
swallowing a fox!)

The Goth lifted up her rounded cheeks, 
for the hunt to run uphill.
Now apart from the extra thrill,
it gave me the chance to look inside
to see where the fox had managed to hide…
As I say, she was a comic. 
Not really funny, but polychromic.

DRIVE

I love the way you drive

It’s like the way you love, full throttle with the most reckless of intentions

The streetlights seem to bow and dim upon your approach, like sentries guarding the darkness ahead, signaling safe passage

Your kisses become comfort in the low lights of the dashboard, but I’ve never encountered someone with such passionate monsters

You chase your engine like an armed pilgrim, on the way to lay siege to the promised land, shrieking back into the disappearing landscape 

What is it of rot and ruin, that pursues you with such wretched conviction?

As the icy road passes underneath with quiet caress, we barrel into a new dawn of deliverance, carrying the spark that will ignite the fires of reckoning

Where we will stand witness to the decline of the benevolence of slaughter

Together, We Are Monsters

My film is not a dream. 
It is a giallo birthed from a Hammer film. 
British cleavage blood-drenched in Italian fantasy. 
Dubbed English heightens the unreality
of me, former Puerto Rican altar boy, 
looming behind you, white girl.
You. Turn.    
Out of lips synced too precisely to my libido
you purr, “I never try anything. I just do it.” 
A quiet bang 
spreads across my mind 
in thick viscera. 
I do not know who the monster is. 
There is a rusty gleam, 
smearing over this flick like a money shot,
gratuitous, just shy of pornographic. 
Unless, a person can feel pornography.
My deepest rape fantasies 
intertwining with my sticky heart strings in a tangled, 
messy 
scream 
for you.  

There are many questions posed in my scream, a bouquet: 
venus fly traps, triffids, flowers that inhale moonlight. 
Why can’t I love with sobriety? 
How do I work through embracing my nightmares doggystyle? 
Why can’t I convince you I’m a risk worth taking?  
Did the first two questions answer the third? 
“I want to carry you off to my Black Lagoon.”  
What would you do with this truth?

Compress the questions down my throat like coal. The result:
not a diamond for an Adam’s apple but a puzzlebox. 
The solution is speech, 
but these hallelujahs are for The Scarlet Gospels 
according to Clive Barker. 
It is his angels, 
leather-strapped Cenobites,
I’ll call forth. 
They have such sights to show us,
and they would make deals with me. 
Finally, I’d bend you to my will, and throwing my 
soul to Leviathan is small price, 
but the questions would still be questions
stalking my cobwebbed halls in a porn-shaped zombie of you,
hardly the love poem I had in mind, 
so I forsake the best of all possible
hells for intellectual torture porn. 
Pinhead is disappointed. 
Writhing coffins for two cannot compete 
with my need to be a student of you. 
I’d rather be caught staring into your cleavage, 
possessed by a male gaze, 
riding the sight line to the sin line 
in hopes of finding something less human 
housing a moment of honesty with whatever
Transylvania lurks
under your full moon flesh — 

But hell is full of rebels and compulsive explorers. 
Pinhead turns my gaze to the souls raised and struck down, 
raised and struck down in Styxxxian pools:
flaming liars, cheats, the insatiable kindred spirits. 
I see black sabbath tears,
and black tears congeal into a viscera that never lies or cheats. 
The triple x pools sated as the bottom of a lake full of the dead. 
Questions sink like concrete boots,
and the dead hate the living.

The answers rise when the visceral bodies 
popsicle into a black monolith on water’s skin:
Together, we are monsters. 
Bride of Frankenstein, blonde hair like a bishop’s mitre streaked 
with wild cotton, it is not you I fear, it is me, my weakness, 
my inability to make you feel this heart, hung 
from the tallest gallows by The Puritans and love it.

A Ghost He Made By Accident 

She succumbs inside a claw foot tub.  The 
wrong lips below, two more above splayed 
and squeezed about a cock.  How limberly 
her torso rocks, thighs around his navel, 
submerged face amidst the bubbles, slosh 
of waves churning as he misbehaves
inside a body with a mind brainwashed.
Death was never discussed as cost.  Slave 
he allots such little breaths.  Elevates 
the spine, the dripping breasts, those second lips 
bequeathed a gasp before bath water makes
its own death mask of a skull that is eclipsed 
by the shuddering of maneuvered hips
of a ghost he made by accident. 

Character to Ashes

Neon lights above sizzling feet carrying horny cocks
on abusive asphalt
sex crazed civilization on top of depraved nature
little girls drenched in promiscuity smelling for the
sweat of desperation
the weakest mammals are willing to fuck anything
hunters and gatherers in reverse
gold diggers hunting for gatherers of exclusive cash
machine jizz rubbing it in pockets and mouths
living life stroking the shaft in desperation to become
desperate enough for the cheap perfume scum leg
spreading fuck anyone with a note in his pocket type.
the hipster nights start cycle of victims to fuck or be
fucked doesn’t matter
as long as the world is watching
on screens and in their sweaty palms
creating absence of reality
gangraping culture with minds of cock and pussy and
cash and self presentation
a waterfall of dhiarretic words and images ready to
drench those in the alleys away from the neon lights
and abusive asphalt
a bush in the wind of the nonsensical
ready to set fire before the world burns to ashes
suburban parents film their kids ride tricycles into
the pits of our hell with a smile on their face ready
to upload “here false gods of profit here is the next
craving fiend for your matchbox of personality
apocalypse, I hope he sparks!”
neon lights flicker and flashing
character to ashes sourcing power

The House Clearance

Her thirst for sex was ferocious,
married with 3 children,
she struggled to love and bond
with them and her husband
left, taking them with him

I was called in to pack
what was left behind,
as she had to move from
the 3 bed house

I had never seen
so many batteries and
such a staggering array
of sex toys

‘What the fuck is this?’
asked my female colleague,
holding up a pair
of nipple clamps

‘Fucked if I know’
I lied, ‘I don’t know
what half of this shit is’

‘Neither do I’
she lied in response

Owed to Greed

Pad over to the Poet’s pad. 
Surprise the clown making love to his fist. 
Hoping thereby – he grunts – to get a 
handle on some angle for an ode. 
Sputters, between gasps, concentrating on 
his two-stroke: “Booze in kitch, under 
sink, Popov – beside cleaning fluid can.” 
Spurts across the room at a shelf 
stuffed with self-help books. 
Myriad animalcules perish – 
dried to a horrid death – 
on the binding of a Webster’s. The 
Poet snaps, zips, buckles. Slouches 
onto the couch. Re-enter 
with glasses and the bottle. 
The Poet replaces glasses. 
Mumbles, hates to wank in focus. 
Pulls from his pants a ballpoint. 
Rolls eyes at the ozone. Explains he’s 
fingering the Muse’s organ. 
Play her like a fugue. 
Force registers howl. 
In his grave Bach flips. 
Hand the Poet a vodka flip, 
highball just mixed. 
Both eyes out of his skull lower. 
Chugs the flip. Falls 
to scrawling in a spiral pad 
snatched off the cocktail table: 
“Able was I ere I saw Elba.” 
Sip my drink; suppress a grin; 
start session with: 
“No longer, then, 
I take it, are you Napoleon?”  
The cat catapults across the linoleum; 
caterpillars into the Poet’s lap; glares up 
like I’m in the wrong pigeonhole. 
We chase the tom under the sink, 
whooping like Genociders and Injuns 
bombed on hard cider. Exit – two drowned 
rats in a failed thought experiment. 
Anything held against me, the Poet 
yells, I – hustled out the door 
into the back of the van –  
simply never meant!  

the poor side of town

all the streets
in the poor sections
of towns all look
the same
 
more churches than
well-kept lawns
 
more liquor stores
than cars on blocks
 
my friends would
always get nervous
when i would drive
on that side of town
at night
 
that made me laugh
 
i always felt more
comfortable on the
poor side than the
lower middle class
side i grew up in
 
we all blow smoke 
up our own asses 
over where i lived
 
the poor side had a
true sense of reality
 
and after all
it is only death
 
we’re all going 
to go sometime
 
i’d rather die 
around better 
music

Watering Hole 

He is standing in the middle of the street.
In very short shorts from the 1970s.

Emptying a purple watering can over a pronounced pot hole.
A light sprinkle at first, then he tips the can.

Watering this hole caved right out of the pavement.
That cars slow and weave to avoid.

I wonder what he is hoping to grow.
Hopefully not another child.

He already has too many of them.
The child services lady keeps sniffing around.

Like she remembers those old scratch and sniff books
that made a tire yard smell like bubble gum.

I loved those books.
Sitting in the basement crawlspace
surrounded by panicked silverfish 
and old potatoes with roots long as 
some city busses.

Perhaps that explains some of the disconnect.
Mine and his in this more immediate of slash pieces.

This middle-aged man who remembers to shave.
Watering the street in a black wife beater
that has seen better days. 

A scarred left knee from an old surgery.
And always the stupid purple watering can.