Transparent Words - Poetry

IN THRALL TO LILITH

 

She parades into my dreams: her impudent pudenda, an open, intricately carved flower.

Bees and stinging things live within, waiting for the soft whisper of invitation. She is vinegar

and vanilla, vaseline and vagina.

 

 

She is a cascade of vocabulary: vibrant and vivid. The supreme vivisector of vacuous

idolatry.

 

 

Her dictionary is a thrashing of ten-fold limbs; and all meaning is encoded in the fluttering of

her labial wings. I am a prisoner to her intelligence, her volition, her erudition.

 

 

There are pale blue men

working her Siberian pits,

freezing;

and all for the want of a kiss.

 

 

Lying out on her gypsy brass bed, she smokes a cheroot: staining the walls with disdainful

agitation - her cheeks, red as the cheeks of Modigliani’s whores.

 

 

The blasphemies of pigment beguile: viscous rivers drain the soul of every homely warmth.

Her likeness cannot be caught: it eludes with simplistic ease. Teasing, she baffles me with

the pink virtuosity of her tongue.

 

 

In vain, I reach out to grasp her grassy banks: yearning for the safety of a foreign shore;

the heat of inevitability, the dark depths of her cavities.

 

 

It was she who devoured my strong ancestors: she who left Christ crying and gasping for

breath. What hope then for me, with only my clotted paintbrushes and second hand

adjectives to protect me?

 

 

The future, I see, is a glassy cold pit: yielding nothing more than small handfuls of flawed

diamonds.