URANIAN POEMS

HAIKU
Canada 1998

Nudist weekend camp.
The cooks hairy belly
tastes of sundry juices.

In the sauna
water drips on an old snakeskin
and my older foreskin.

After the sauna
night-breeze on our nipples.
The Northern Lights.

Falling leaves wantonly drift
into motley orgies.

Friendless and
magnificent above McDonalds
the harvest moon.

Hoar-frost on the hair
upon the chests of the
magic-mushroom gatherers.

We look beautiful
especially if we are naked
when moongazing.

Was I nuzzling his nuts
or did I fall into the love-nest
of the Buddha ?

The night so dark and intimate
that I could stroke the stars.

Dark undergrowth.
Pubic hair in moonlight
and a Roman Candle to be lit.

Naked in the autumn dew
astride a naked man
upon the leaf-clothed earth.

Cradling his litheness
and the ground also well-kissed
by gentle leaves.

In my autumn groin
mist and rain and river
are indistinguishable.

Sunset. Flesh-coloured
clouds. Exquisite solitude
before the long night.

Painting by Anthony Weir

Grey November day.
No love-letter lies
sodden on the path.

Cobwebs in fog.
I cant tell my end
from my beginning.

Swirling fog. Although
he promised, the man I lay with
never visited.

RAISON D'ETRE,
FAÇON A MOI (Ætatis XL)

I wished as a child to be black
like Epaminondas in my story-book,
and grow up bearded and hairy and wear
a gold ring in my ear like a pirate,
and have a tattoo,
and be fluid
in specie and gender
sometimes man
sometimes beast
shapeshifting.

I'm a befriender
of cripples and dwarves
and people who, like my
teddy-bear,
look a bit crumpled
and louche
and don't have two eyes the same.

The Jungle Book
confirmed what I knew:
that beasts are benign.
I like hugging dogs
(beggars and dogs
are eager to greet me).
Cats' faces amuse me.
I could be pander
to stallions and bears,
to Ogres and prophets;
I like to be tender.
I like kissing mouths
surrounded by hairs.

(from Dispatches from the War )

Portrait of Paul

I dreamed.
I woke in tenderness.
I dreamed of tenderness
as a ripe plum squirting
down my beard tenderness
that turned to tide
that flowed through both of us
and in which we floated
through our cuddle-space
wherein our snug adhesion
the unseen ballet of our tongues
the breath shared by each other's lungs
were part of an epiphanic lace
of delicate and gorgeous things
that we in sacred, shared
humility presented to each other
as sweet kings
and the smiling
exuberantly-bearded sun
was his
life-giving face.

Beyond the marzipan
of mere sex, mere poetry
and in the mystic intestine of
non-penetration -
beyond the utilitarian transport
of mere drugs -
my mere and dreary consciousness
briefly gloried in the hairy
vegetable glamour of his hugs.

HAIKU SEQUENCE

Just looking at him
made my nipples turn into
tiny volcanoes.

Autumn last year
was wonderful. You came here
when leaves were gold.
The nights were cold
and cuddly
when you came here.
I toasted you with toasty-tasting bubbly.

And now it's Spring
life's quite a different thing.
It's still cold
and I feel old, bereft
and grimly sorrowing.
I feel that what I feel
is hardly real...

Love is a self-inflicted theft

Dark and wrinkling like a purpled pink
I humbly pant in moss still damp with love
that followed the soft slope to where the buttocks clove
- white buttocks leading to the puckered eyelet's brink.

Filaments have wept like tears of milk
in the cruel south wind which has driven them back
through clots of red marl, to be lost along the track
where the slope called them with surfaces of silk.

My dream has often kissed this enchanted orifice:
my soul, jealous of carnal intercourse,
has made this its tear-bottle and its nest of sobs.

It is the fig of teasing ecstasy for the flute that calls,
for the tube from which the heavenly praline falls:
feminine Canaan that dew anoints and orbs.

The poem above appeared in the enthusiastically-bisexual
Paul Verlaine's collection Hombres,
published posthmumously in 1904.
Here are some diamantes from that collection:

"Let us admire that splendid flesh
as if it had intelligence - trembling,
and shy, but valorously fresh..."

"Even when your cock is small
it offers me untold delight.
Between your thighs gold-haired on white
I'm not averse
to see it cozy on your dark ball-
sack - that masculine and well-filled purse..."

"Come, acorn, come, my heart of oak.
Stand firm and poke
Your roll of pale pink silk
Into my hand until it squirts
Its fecund spurts
Of opalescent milk..."

"My lovers come not from the yuppie classes
but from hick neighborhoods, small towns
and from the land:
young guys with aristocratic asses,
hard muscles - and manners none too grand..."

When all my heroes have grown old
and first-formed mates got stiff and cold
I'll still feel you inside me hurting like a knot

I mailed a horny letter once
meant just for pleasing you
that woman broke the seals and I was forced to lose

Last night the knot was hurting less
hound howling to blue moon
when I was ready to undress Red Rude for your abuse

When all my heroes have grown old
before my limbs get stiff and cold
you'll still be inside me - unravelling the knot