hallar a la que buscáis,
para pretendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia
¿Qué humor puede ser más raro
que el que, falto de consejo,
el mismo empaña el espejo
y siente que no esté claro?
Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.
Opinión, ninguna gana:
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana
Siempre tan necios andáis
que, con desigual nivel,
a una culpáis por crüel
y a otra por fácil culpáis.
¿Pues cómo ha de estar templada
la que vuestro amor pretende,
si la que es ingrata, ofende,
y la que es fácil, enfada?
Mas, entre el enfado y pena
que vuestro gusto refiere,
bien haya la que no os quiere
y quejaos en hora buena.
Dan vuestras amantes penas
a sus libertades alas,
y después de hacerlas malas
las queréis hallar muy buenas.
¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido
en una pasión errada:
la que cae de rogada
o el que ruega de caído?
¿O cuál es más de culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?
Pues ¿para quée os espantáis
de la culpa que tenéis?
Queredlas cual las hacéis
o hacedlas cual las buscáis.
Dejad de solicitar,
y después, con más razón,
acusaréis la afición
de la que os fuere a rogar.
Bien con muchas armas fundo
que lidia vuestra arrogancia,
pues en promesa e instancia
juntáis diablo, carne y mundo.
Stupid Men
Silly, you men – so very adept
at wrongly faulting womankind,
not seeing you’re alone to blame
for faults you plant in woman’s mind.
After you’ve won by urgent plea
the right to tarnish her good name,
you still expect her to behave –
you, that coaxed her into shame.
You batter her resistance down
and then, all righteousness, proclaim
that feminine frivolity,
not your persistence, is to blame.
When it comes to bravely posturing,
your witlessness must take the prize:
you’re the child that makes a bogeyman,
and then recoils in fear and cries.
Presumptuous beyond belief,
you’d have the woman you pursue
be Thais when you’re courting her,
Lucretia once she falls to you.
For plain default of common sense,
could any action be so queer
as oneself to cloud the mirror,
then complain that it’s not clear?
Whether you’re favoured or disdained,
nothing can leave you satisfied.
You whimper if you’re turned away,
you sneer if you’ve been gratified.
With you, no woman can hope to score;
whichever way, she’s bound to lose;
spurning you, she’s ungrateful –
succumbing, you call her lewd.
Your folly is always the same:
you apply a single rule
to the one you accuse of looseness
and the one you brand as cruel.
What happy mean could there be
for the woman who catches your eye,
if, unresponsive, she offends,
yet whose complaisance you decry?
Still, whether it’s torment or anger –
and both ways you’ve yourselves to blame –
God bless the woman who won’t have you,
no matter how loud you complain.
It’s your persistent entreaties
that change her from timid to bold.
Having made her thereby naughty,
you would have her good as gold.
So where does the greater guilt lie
for a passion that should not be:
with the man who pleads out of baseness
or the woman debased by his plea?
Or which is more to be blamed –
though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin?
So why are you men all so stunned
at the thought you’re all guilty alike?
Either like them for what you’ve made them
or make of them what you can like.
If you’d give up pursuing them,
you’d discover, without a doubt,
you’ve a stronger case to make
against those who seek you out.
I well know what powerful arms
you wield in pressing for evil:
your arrogance is allied
with the world, the flesh, and the devil!
Ego
Eileen Sheehan
When she doesn’t want to make love
he says, What’s wrong?
As if something must be.
She says, There’s nothing wrong.
He says, But there must be something wrong.
The master, needing reasons.
She feels she should
have a note from her mother …
Dear Sir
would you please excuse my daughter from sex
the time of the month is not right
she’s worried about the telephone bill
an earthquake rocked Tokyo tonight
she’s afraid of waking the baby
Halley’s comet won’t pass again for sixty-seven years
she’s afraid of making a baby
and the Dow Jones index showed
an unfavourable low at close of business
and you probably did it last night
two nights ago at the most …
He nudges her with his elbow.
Go on, you can tell me what’s wrong.
Was it something I did? Something I said?
But there’s nothing wrong, I keep telling you!
Deflated, he heaves towards the wall,
taking his questions, and most of the blankets.
Freezing on the edge of the world
she knows that nothing is wrong,
for tonight she has learnt three things;
about ego,
the tug of the moon,
why women invented the headache.
Annus Mirabilis
Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
7
‘OH RIGHT. YOU PEOPLE DON’T REMOVE THAT BIT’
Bloody Hell, It’s Barbara!
Lu
ke Wright
The tits that crashed a thousand cars,
a hot knife through the city’s bars,
full complement of facial scars –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
All thunder thighs and lightning hair,
resplendent in her underwear,
I want that one, it isn’t fair!
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Well versed in dark romantic arts,
she feeds each night on fledgling hearts,
indeed on any private parts –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Bloody hell! OMG! Sacré bleu! It’s Barbara!
As sumptuous and stylish as a Gothic candelabra.
I want to dock my dinghy in the safety of your harbour.
A bidet full of ice would not begin to cool my ardour.
The kind of broad that gangsters rate,
the type to make kings abdicate,
enough to turn the Navy straight –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Boudicca but soaked in liquor,
tactless as a bumper sticker,
Oh la la, my dicker ticker!
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Think boozy busty nightclub rep
meets Super Nanny all windswept,
I think I need the naughty step –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Bloody hell! What’s all this? Free Tibet! It’s Barbara.
Imagine Mrs Robinson, if she had come from Scarborough.
She twists herself around you like clematis on an arbour.
In every English town a fella’s weeping to his barber.
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Her love is aching arteries,
her night caps nips of anti-freeze,
my sonnets bawdy journalese,
as sure as pepper makes you sneeze
and Russians come from overseas,
I want you Barbara, can I please,
I need to hear you pant and wheeze,
I’m begging you, I’m on my knees,
just give me all your STDs –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Bloody hell! Stop the clocks! Bring out your dead! It’s Barbara.
I want to take a tit-bit from your cool and gloomy larder.
I think I’m at the end now ’cause the rhymes are getting harder,
so here it is, the chorus line
just shout it out one final time –
Bloody hell, it’s Barbara!
Sex without Love
Sharon Olds
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health – just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
Out of Office
Cora Greenhill
Just after the interview, he’d groped
her breasts inside her low cut dress.
She didn’t resist. And so it went on.
Disarmed by his cool persistence,
she agreed to this tryst in town.
The Mercedes had deep leather seats
and tinted windows, dimming her view
of the naked women washing in ditches
along the road to Enugu.
The narrow room was stifling hot
in the afternoon. The Professor,
so charming, so well-read, sweated
as he slurped his bush meat soup,
sat beside her on the single bed.
She’d asked for a club sandwich and coke
but it hadn’t come and nothing was said.
He wiped his mouth, removed her dress,
arranged her like books on his desk,
Scanning her nakedness like a good report,
he straddled her, unbuttoned, taut.
But when his hand rubbed up against
her swollen shaft, a gasp, ‘What’s that?’
Then, proud of recalling the quirky fact,
‘Oh right. You people don’t remove that bit,
isn’t it?’
Somehow she let him carry on –
sawing away like a carpenter
while she grew wet and sore
and didn’t come. Straight after, he said
he had to get home to pick up his mum.
The mother didn’t stoop to greet her,
in the back of the car where he’d left her
– just a new white assistant teacher.
Poem while Reading Miroslav Holub in the Genito-urinary Clinic Waiting Room
Rich Goodson
Live, alive-ho! These bugs! These bugs! Alive!
They’ve leapt between us since we flapped in slime,
jump ship, like pirates, to the brink of Time.
We’re hit. We take in water. They survive.
& here we wait for test results, pretend
to read. You: What Car? Me: Holub’s Selected
which permeates my bones till I’m infected.
Does every rhyme of loins sound out the end?
If you weren’t such a bloke I’d hold your hand
uncurl it, break it open like a tight
wet waterlily bulb, there to find – stowed –
the toxic larvae of angels. I’d wind
the clocks back to that hot, barbaric night.
I’d burn them off your palm, watch them explode.
King Solomon and King David
James Ball Naylor
King Solomon and King David
Led merry merry lives
With many many lady friends
And many many wives;
But when old age crept up on them
With many many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And King David wrote the Psalms.
The Walk of Shame
Nikki Magennis
Last night’s gladrags transform in daylight.
Crimson lipstick bitten from the very centre
of my mouth leaves a tide line, heart shaped.
These red shoes were never meant for treading
the long path home – kitten heels jack me up
pointing sinwards, downhill as fast as I
can possibly slide. The holes snagged in my tights gape
wide as the mouth of a shocked onlooker, as if your hands
had left prints in a repeating pattern
all over my lower half. Can they tell,
the street sweepers, delivery men and dirty-faced tramps
that I’ve been out all night, mauling hot flesh
getting intimate with an unknown lover?
This morning I walk home empty handed
nameless, and despite myself, carrying no trace of regret.
Municipal Ambition
Amy McCauley
When I think of the bodies I ran from.
Throwing myself on the mercy of gras
s pastures and filthy mattresses.
The springs, the bedsits, the landscape miniatures.
And worst of all, the way they sewed me up like a purse
so I wouldn’t try and get out.
Or in, they couldn’t decide which.
When I think of the bad love.
The girl who lost it again and again on that patch of municipal lawn.
Hot sap running down her thighs.
The girl who held herself at arm’s length all her life.
Who couldn’t bear to look herself in the eye
let alone love.
When I think of the neglect.
The years of untended want gone to waste.
My God. I could go down on my knees and weep.
Weep! like a silent movie heroine bathed in the torchlight of pathos.
And all my starved orifices would form a chorus of sobs
and pourforth, sputtering like outside taps.
When I think of the pangs in windowless rooms.
The years of skulduggery and subterfuge.
I could swear it was someone else the whole time.
I could scream:
Make way for more!
More bad love! More neglect! More pourforth!
Madmen
Fleur Adcock
Odd how the seemingly maddest of men –
sheer loonies, the classically paranoid
violently possessive about their secrets,
whispered after from corners, terrified
of poison in their coffee, driven frantic
(whether for or against him) by discussion of God
peculiar, to say the least, about their mothers –
The Poetry of Sex Page 10