Saturday, September 15, 2007

If I Knew What a Rooster Looked Like, I'd Be Famux Already

If I seem quiet, it's because I am busy drafting a Top Secret Bookcover for myself and some Top Secret Illustrations. Don't tell me! I understand enormously that the only kind of manuscript more undesirable than a regular poetry manuscript is an illustrated poetry manuscript; I slap myself as I draw, but I cannot stop. A terrible change has occurred in me. When I was a child, I thought I would like to have a Famous Painting for a bookcover--a man with the head of a rooster adjusting his cravat, perhaps. I was saddened to learn that such a painting did not in fact exist, and resolved that I must make my own way in the world.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

THE QUEST FOR INTELLIGENCE IN SEX

The quest for intelligence in sex
Requires a Sahara of apathy, the boredom
Of pyramids and dunes, the sphinx
On its litterbox, sadism in place of adrenalin,
No hedonist, de Sade, while a love nest’s
A more humid oasis with five-eyed cocks’
Periscopic tumescence, hen stench, field animals
Humping like camels, bellies propped on legs
Like sawhorses and pressed for glimpses of bliss,
O ship of desolate reality, the desert,
Which priests of intelligence keep spearing
In clear-minded rage, O hair-lipped and homely,
May migraines blind them, and swimming vipers
Bind them, and send me, while my quiver holds

A few more arrows of desire, a rosewood turtle
Box hiding a girl’s smaragdine eyes, cheeks red
From breathlessness as if she’s just arrived
From riding with a horde of murderous equestrians
Who equated fighting strength with staying
Unwashed, her own sweet neck bent like a swan
Under chains of coins, onyx tresses, the strange
Shyness of her soul. Sculptors on Rhodes
Did the priest, his puzzled sons, and Poseidon’s
Snakes in marble blocks, lost a millennium
Due to the Goths, and Nero who buried it,
The Laocoon, and then performed his violin
Impromptu for urban renewal, which like sex
Vanishes with the past, and has no intelligence.

Patricia Lockwood said...

Well, you're not in the wrong place, I'll say that for you. Periscopic tumescence!