Janet Jackson wrote:
> This gets a bit yucky. Be warned!
> Comments on poetics are welcome.
>
> *thin*
>
Good grief. For ME this is one of those poems you sense rather than
read. It has all the desolation of a Hopper painting: "Morning Sun," or
a mid-Sixties Dylan song (Tom Thumb's Blues) It feels (my own call)
like the most desolate place on earth: the empty bed that a couple of
hours ago was undulating. "He was so hot." And then he is so gone. I
feel devastation, the field of tares without wheat. Someone published a
book years back, a nice potboiler read called *The Weight of Water*. So
this one is *The Weight of Semen*. I'm not being funny. The poem is not
being funny.
The human contact, the intimacy, is not there. Can someone be "hot" but
not touch you elementally? I don't think I like the answer I'm getting:
> He was so hot.
> From the drawer by the sink
> I get the big scissors and, not knowing
> what will happen, make a small cut
> near the end of one condom. His come rushes
> onto my skin, cool, amniotic,
> albumen-clingy, thin, slightly
> distasteful. I wouldn't lick it,
> now.
>
> The kitchen is chill, silent, scentless.
> I raise the hand, inhale:
> musky, grassy come-smell
> tainted with latex.
> I can't smell *him*, only
> an abstraction.
Whether I'm reading into it...these last lines cut deep:
> The life I didn't want
> runs over my hand into the bin.
>
> Before I can do anything
> I have to wash it off me.
The question the poem does not ask: "What have I come to?" Maybe I read
it wrong. It still hurts.
Ken
--
----------------------------
Ken Wolman
http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com
http://opensalon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman
http://wearethecure.org/friends/cids-memory-p-394.html
|