Weird Lovers
MY LADY OF THE CHIROPTERANS
My lady wears the evening as her cloak,
goes traipsing through her cloisters in the nude.
Her fine, vampiric pheromones evoke
a lustful, unremitting turpitude.
The shadows like chiropterans unfold
betwixt her legs; my tongue, a hungry thing
and lean, grows frantic in its foraging
where musk commingles with a scent of mold.
Transformed by all her sorceries of old,
by epochs of insane debauchery,
I ferret out the fox within her folds,
and bring her once again to ecstacy.
My lady, disappearing in a fog,
looks back and says, “I like you as a dog.”
ON THE RAG
I ate the poet, swallowed her in ten
or twelve heartbeats, long enough to savor
the sweet sweat, the sharp tang of the menses.
My talons flex, relax, and grab the pen
I regurgitated. I shall favor
her with rhymes, the choicest felicities,
for I adore les beaux arts, and often,
after dinner, sex, a demon’s labors,
wax dreamily poetic. Ill at ease
among the boorish legions of the Beast,
a connoisseur of poets on the rag,
I’d gladly give my antlers for a meet
sonnet — worthy of the Muse — that wouldn’t gag
me. Am I not becoming what I eat?
DAS GIFT
A little poison now and then:
that makes for agreeable dreams.
And much poison in the end,
for an agreeable death.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s not from any lipstick you’d prefer,
this lovely blue carnation on your lips —
on all your lips, the major and the minor,
not one of them a stranger to a kiss.
It’s not that shades of blue are de rigueur,
a silly fad or cosmetician’s trip,
it’s just that you were careless in the diner,
too drunk to know that something was amiss.
A sudden cobalt blush adorns your nails,
entices me to cyanotic sex.
Let’s do it, ere the magic moment fails
and death begins evincing its effects.
Your panties, too, are blue! Despite the holes,
they complement your cyan areoles.
SHEOLA
When fey Sheola comes the moon is bright,
the yaks are shaggy in the autumn chill,
and prayerwheels are intolerably still.
She merges with the shadows of the night.
With purpose weird she wanders far and wide
in search of yetis, male and postpubescent;
with eyes that beckon, oddly erubescent,
she sees where all the chary children hide.
No siren’s song could match the witch’s wail
that lures the striplings to the moonlit glade
where women dance, and sordid games are played.
Their strange miscegenations fill the vale.
From far and wide cathectic yetis run
to join the bacchanal, and have some fun.
LEAVES
Through autumn woods I wandered for a time,
but soon I glimpsed a boneyard on the hill.
The trees were barren and the wind was chill,
and fraught with voices urging me to climb.
Around the stones, marmoreal and gray,
dead leaves had piled high in separate mounds;
fell winds had placed those sere and brown bouquets...
or spirits far too restless for the ground.
Like dervishes, the leaves began to whirl
and flutter in the air above the dead.
Weird, crepitating laughter filled my head,
and suddenly, a leaf-encrusted girl
with oak and maple swaddling her remains,
reached up and brought the winter to my brain.
HER TECHNOLOGIES
She traveled back in time to meet the greats
of science and the arts, true prodigies
whose brilliance made them sadly out-of-date.
She’d wine and dine them, put them at their ease
with jokes and badinage, and then she’d bait
them with a glimpse of her technologies.
They’d call their wives and tell them they’d be late,
unmindful of the risk of STDs.
Betwixt her legs a switch would activate
a sequence of events, her android charms
no genius could resist would stimulate
a passion rarely felt in human arms.
Absconding with their precious DNAs,
she’d vanish to another time and place.
ODALISQUE IN ORCUS
She pours the blood with eager, trembling hands,
her eyes aflame with love and candid lust —
but mine coagulates and forms a crust
as pheromones play havoc with my glands.
Her nipples wax tumescent as we touch,
the blood forgotten in the cup she holds;
disrobing in a trice, not saying much,
two demons grow implacable and bold.
My talons, roving slyly, find a spot
that sends a pulse of pleasure through her loins;
we stroke each other’s bodies, touching groins
that soon grow moist and branding-iron hot.
“Let’s do it,” purrs my demoness, and sighs,
while brushing shreds of lovers from her thighs.
EARTHSIDE LOVER
Ensorceled by an Earthside woman’s touch,
by kisses from a mouth so soft and sweet,
I felt my hearts go down in glad defeat:
I’ve never loved a human quite so much.
But whims of starship commodores prevailed
and banished me upon a ship of light.
Although I’m far away, and plans have failed,
I’ll not relinquish her without a fight!
And yet, withal, she’s never far away,
a hologram of thought, forever bright.
I treasure most my short, synthetic nights,
when once again our sundered spirits play
like eager children, anxious to explore
that gorgeous, bright blue planet I adore.
ENTROPY
The failing sun grows dim as kalpas fly,
and Time grows weary of its endless flight
from nowhere into nothing — while the Night
expunges all the starlight from the sky.
The dust of worlds innebulates the stars,
and domineering Chaos claims its throne.
The last of men seek renascence on Mars,
alone among the zigguratic domes.
Two lovers join together with a lust
grown joyous in defiance of the Night;
they lose themselves on Mars, whose timeless dust
obscures their own, and disappear from sight.
But all the stars are blind; no eyes will see
our joyous end, our tragic destiny.
DEAD
after seeing The Sixth Sense
A kind, selective blindness spares the soul
from pain it can’t support, or tragedy
it must have merely dreamt, and keeps it whole:
we only see the things we wish to see.
One day a man came calling for my wife.
I heard them from the basement, where I worked
at writing sonnets day and night. My life
depended on it. So, from where I lurked,
I heard their conversation in my mind.
“I’m still in mourning,” Toni said. “My Keith
has left me here with sonnets and with grief.”
My pen could write no more, and I could find
no sand in which to hide my ostrich head —
for that’s when I discovered I was dead.
Poems copyright © 1978-2000 by Keith Allen Daniels