This is a wonderful poem - rich and sensuous, and full of delicious imagery.
It's also a metaphor for the fears that all men harbour, somewhere in the
paranoid depths of their subconscious, about all women (well, that's my
theory, anyway). I shall come back to this one again and again.
Sarah
----- Original Message -----
From: "grasshopper" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 10:04 PM
Subject: New sub: Mermaiden
> Mermaiden
>
>
> She sits on an pearled imperial rock,
> scaly buttocks snug against the shells.
> Limpets lickle at her fingers, pedicure
>
> her tail-tips. She sighs, tastes the salt
> on her lips, thinks of sailors, a mariner
> with tousled chest and blue-irised Irish eyes,
>
> sweet matelot. a sea-dog she will leash
> with the Hokusai whorls of her hair,
> burnished like sunbeams on wave-curls.
>
> She combs her locks with honeyed words,
> blows kisses at the lusty gulls, hears their shrieks
> climax on a hump of landed orca.
>
> Her heart is brine, harder than Lot's wife,
> baked and caked by long years on the flats
> of water. Her eyes are liquid, like her song.
>
> Beware of her beauty, as cruel as the ocean,
> as eternal as the wash of waves, the wane
> of shore. She is in her element, you are mere
>
> mammal, juicy and ungilled. A subtle mind is nothing
> more than tissue. She will lace it on the swell
> like marbled fat on meat. She will dissolve you
>
> into her queendom. You will spill guts, groin
> and begetting into a sudden maelstrom
> of sharp reflected stars.
>
> grasshopper
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