Impromptu Retranscriptions from the 'Song of Songs' (erotic poetry - explicit language)

 

                                  I.

 

When my lips mouth yours where they are hidden most-

Your voice bells into flits of orioles,

Capsizing all sounds heights hold as their neighbours,

At the scented orchid of your carmine touch:

A benison the tongue holds, folding nectars

More than evodias mold, full of more flowers

Than can cry the name of Lilith, if you let me

Speak of tongue-time: of all toxins, and all joywards

Scribe, of all that poisons softly at this needing;

For I proclaim your taste the subject of all wanting,

And all touch, if you were touched to make me be.

 

                                  II.

 

Transcendent Ode you do not write, I only

Make of other majesties their lack your liars;

Your hair burns black for all they sense its spires,

But I would not care what dark our hearts betray.

And through the tessellated freight and foison

Of your carriage through the myths of cinnabar,

The redness of your lips themselves require no poison,

But the musk of you yourself, to cast my bar.

 

                               III.

 

So gatherest up into hush; ‘orating plain',

Your tongue kneads bells from silences as sparse

As any I could wish in blinkered pain

To pass at last, in this white universe…

Unwnowingly, that garrets into highs

That weep not for one flower's broken breath:

Or seeks to hear the dreams of dragonflies,

But deign me peace in transient swathes of death.

 

                             IV.

 

And I looked for you here, but you were not there,

Upon the heath or by the city limits, hardly

Seeking as a drought that nomads into wasp

For fluid, gently, gently:

Under waltzing cloud-sprockets irradiat-

       ing from a sea of cloudless eyes; the merchant bankers

And the fishermen afloat rejected me-

       Accepting

Though from Clyde through Thames-

The white wind's will may whisper John and James-

With myself the only witness. Hear no prayer,

You who lope, O you who slope so tall;

The fluid freshets of the unborn Fall

Will be the only ones who stand my chanticleer.

       Assemble

       Coverts,

       Strangely…

Once the wage is taken,

Once I seek my stranger who is loveliest-

Among the strangers hiding, ‘Glide' eliding me

Into that hold I near and miss the most:

And nameless, wave my name in sway, O ghost

Away with skiffs that ride to me through ‘See'.

 

                         V.

 

Your cunt breathes orchids that outlive all colours

Of the lips of roses; veins of dragon's vice

Bequeath their lambent gladness to the limbs of others,

And make the storm-paced morn a plastic paradise.

Into the lanes of reverie, whose flood-floats of things

One rise abandons, from sobriety-

That only comes from slumber, through the sapphire rings

That sated flash past our satiety,

Lend your flesh unphantoms and your ghosts of gladness,

And the things failed safe by in our flailing sights:

Towards the lampless lands and lamping lanes of sadness-

Saved in the paler sail-length of your midmost mights.

 

                       VI.

 

My lady's skin walls whiter than a wraith of jasmines

Have come from Orient strands of whiter strains-

Than deck the merry chaplets of the greenhouse guardians

Winter brings to drown within its rainbow lanes…

When cyan harbours arboured of the sky's own pardons

Throng our folly, caught within another's glove:

In seek for one, supplants the Azure that foots through all gardens-

That rainbows lordship-Light and lows of Love.