Poetry Year October 15

The hot poker slices in between my legs,
burning, scalding, searing all the delicate tissue of that skin
that skin that is hidden ever from light of day,
or probing touch of any eye,
but open as a road,
as a road as a road,
to the driving molten metal that you wield.

I cry out,
because I cannot move,
the ice cold iron bans constrict my wrists,
my wrists and arms
my arms and shoulders,
my ankles and arms,
my knees and legs.

They bite into each turn of softness that I possess.
As the iron hot consumes me.
My silken contours blackened
by the instrumental burning bright.

An immolation at hard hands,
those hands, those hands that I have kissed
groveling before the legs,
those pillars upon which
the sun god's temple rests,
the eggs of his adornment before my eyes.

Suicide sweet suicide
thou art a dream within us all.
The need to be destroyed in pleasure's place,
overwhelmed by commands of the needs of the race.

[I feel I need to write an annotation here to this one, because it is potentially misunderstood. The imagery of rape and torture here is common, both for the men that consume such images, and for women who experience them. Almost every woman has had images of sex and death, and even painful death. The poem presents an explanation for this masochism, namely, that pregnancy and reproduction were, and in much of the world still are, a grave risk of physical death. Even where they are not physical death, they are a giving up of chances and opportunities, and that focus on the self that a young person enjoys. I am on one side of this wall and it looms high in front of me.

Thus masochism is not because the "I," that inner tender self, desires it of it's inner needs, but it is, instead, an apparition, a way of creating imagery for a drive which is foreign to it, but pressed by the evolutionary demands of self-replication.

So I am not, here or elsewhere, proposing the pleasures of mutilation, but their coercive seduction by within, and their imposition without. Yes the narrator of the poem is consumed with this, but narrators are not the author, and almost never all of the author. Usually I leave to others matters of interpretation, because the multitopical nature of writing is better left to turn in its own geography.

But this, sadly, needs this note to prevent people from erecting a mountain in place of a valley...]