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ps: I can still taste you.
love sonnet xi…
L
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
— Pablo Neruda —
not a man…
If you like
I’ll be furious flesh elemental,
or- changing to tones that the sunset arouses- if you like-
I’ll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man but – a cloud in trousers.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky –
open our wings…
Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us:
We taste only sacredness.
– Rumi –
a fervor parches you sometimes…
A fervor parches you sometimes,
And you hunch over it, silent,
Cruel, and timid; and sometimes
You are frightened with wantonness,
And give me your desperation.
Mostly we lurk in our coverts,
Protecting our spleens, pretending
That our bandages are our wounds.
But sometimes the wheel of change stops;
Illusion vanishes in peace;
And suddenly pride lights your flesh –
Lucid as diamond, wise as pearl –
And your face, remote, absolute,
Perfect and final like a beast’s.
It is wonderful to watch you,
A living woman in a room
Full of frantic, sterile people,
And think of your arching buttocks
Under your velvet evening dress,
And the beautiful fire spreading
From your sex, burning flesh and bone,
The unbelievably complex
Tissues of you brain all alive
Under your coiling, splendid hair.
I like to think of you naked.
I put your naked body
Between myself alone and death.
If I go into my brain
And set fire to you sweet nipples,
To the tendons beneath your knees,
I can see far before me.
It is empty there where I look,
But at least it is lighted.
I know how your shoulders glisten,
How your face sinks into trance,
And your eyes like a sleepwalker’s,
And your lips of a woman
Cruel to herself.
I like to
Think of you clothed, your body
Shut to the world and self-contained,
Its wonderful arrogance
That makes all women envy you.
I can remember every dress,
Each more proud than a naked nun.
When I go to sleep my eyes
Close in a mesh of memory.
Its cloud of intimate odor
Dreams instead of myself.
– Kenneth Rexroth –
