For a Man


Women make better friends, they said

Nails bite like incisors into soft, warm flesh

Women are fluid

 

Then I took

A man with big hands and enormous feet

Whose hair tickles parts of me

About which my Mother didn’t tell

Fingers that sing tricky tunes of love

The bee’s sting of desire

 

I know women

But I love a man

 

I am not a traitor to my sisters’ cause

Punching my fist in the face of ideological rejection

I am the projection of

Purity

Love

Truth

Merely human

 

Louise M. Hart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking the P. H. out of Love


For the only man I really loved and

the alcoholic Scottish afternoons, evenings and nights…

I loved him

Like a comfort blanket

I would wrap around me

Twice a week

But the blanket

Cut

Into my flesh

Like the cheap vodka bottles

Whose contents

We projectile vomited

Against a wall

Cracked with my spidery

Web of deceit

And all to prevent us from falling

More deeply

Into reality’s slow waves

Of unreturnable sleep

Every hug

The blanket bestowed

Represented a drink

Poured down my hoary throat

As dry

As a virgin’s quim

Or a mammary gland

No natural man

Could possibly caress

And hardwired to out queer

My more masterful

Sapphic sisters

And the screaming queens

Who were my soul brother’s

Chicken licking lovers

A comfort blanket

Embroidered

With the discarded nails

He plucked

From his outrageously orange

Tinted fingers tips

As he plucked me

The shallow and demanding female

Who roughly stroked his skin

And sucked his bones

Only to please

And manipulate him

I did not even feel his nails

Prick

Me inside

Rather dismissing the blood

I shed

From my womanly empty head

To the rosy pink tips

Of my inverted toes

And MY tits

With an extravagant

Swish of the hand

Of every unwanted thought

I fought to valiantly dismiss

The kisses I imparted

Were shaped

For the delectation

Of another’s lips

For, though my heart lightened

In his presence

It burned in hers

She did not break it

It was I who reached inside

My own compliant chest

And withdrew

The essential organ

Of all hope and penetrable pleasure

At the height

Of a micro second of time

When I realised

That I could never

Love his kind, again

And thus, never did

On an absence of love…


I am too old for love
Worn out, like last year’s aged slippers
I lament the drunken nights I spent
Within the naked reach of pleasure

Beyond the call of the mistress of misery
Whose fragile waist I clasp
Fearful of descent beneath the bellow of her underskirts
I am secure in the certainty of my own solitude

Contemptuous of the art of living
Death wishes are, but my faux pleasure
I am too old for love
But young enough to die choking on my words

Like an emasculated poet