Poems

Thirteen Attempts on the Life of Trivial Love

If the word is the basis for action, let's deliver the word from its domestic servitude, infecting it with cancer, with the most venomous and incurable virus, and hurl it at the body of trivial love.
 
LLUÍS FERNÁNDEZ, The Naked Anarchist
 
1. Widowed reasons why
‘it happens that I'm tired of being a man',
torn fertile liquid
of the woman I'm not; clear
liquid overflowing from
the breasts I don't possess. 
 
2. Always the enigmas of coitus
conducted with myself: uroboros,
Möbius strip. Evidence left
by a handful, a mob
that spreads within me
-circulates, wants something: loves, loves itself.
 
3. There are women, nightmares of mine,
dead inside me - discarded like scalps. 
 
4. In the photographs of me as a child
I pale into the background, a tangle
of trembling carnal energy, without
smiles, without fear, without neurosis.
 
5. Mysteries of my lips under that
imperious solipsistic moustache,
the hirsute landscape of minor characters. 
 
6. The sense of touch, sweat, my own, a man's,
at times, over flesh in joyous half-light,
unknown, thirsting flesh;  unforgettable flesh
with a heart sharpened and made buoyant
and other ancient heartbeats, generous flesh
cleaving to me, to my embodied fictions
of someone else, of my own shady self. 
 
7. A drought divides us,
both the flame of my spine
and your fiery vertebrae
know it forever. 
 
8. Ah! Sudden chasms opening
in my appetite: coming of age
and its frustrated heavens, the gardens
of such predatory hunger,
that the male skull,
dramatically underlit,
senses with gritted teeth. 
 
9. Phallus and sperm, towering symbols
and meticulous trinkets of trivial love -
adamantine tombstone in my adult loins. 
 
10. And yet who wants this guilt anyway:
dead fragments of the gimno-phallus,
of the vulva-cave: Guilt. 
 
11. I don't want these rooted guilts,
like countless devotional scapulars
hung inside, the wrong side, of my manly robe. 
 
12. I give my man's word - how much it weighs,
severely circulates, distilling the gentle,
muscular scent of giving way, of stepping out
to the pavement's edge, of stretching forth
a hand - merely tendons, veins.  
 
13. My words would like to
heal this wound: bitten
deep by trivial love. 
 
Love, love, stay your impure stride.
VICENTE ALEIXANDRE