This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.

Once he lived a schoolmaster
With a stark, denying look;
A string of scholars went in fear
Of his great birch and his great book.

Like the clangour of a bell,
Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet.
That is how he learnt so well
To take the roses for his meat.

I would simply wish to hold you as

the weather holds the day,

as bitterness holds winter with her

effervescent greys.

You would clutch me all to tightly,

then float as if to say,

‘I am air and you are soil,

We love often (not today).’

You would shimmer gently past,

a moment on a breeze;

Our love would be a smoulder,

ashes dying in the eaves.

Or maybe we could push against

complexities of late,

The slow and painful waltz between the lovers,

Love and Hate.

Maybe we would settle, and you’d freeze

a plaster doll;

But I would rather love you like the day,

Fleetingly,

Or not at all.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!


And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees
the sweet rain drifting through western air
a white sweating bull of a poet told us


our ***** are ugly—why didn't we
admit we have thought so too? (And
what shame? They are not for the eye!)


No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,
caves of the Moon ... And when a
dark humming fills us, a


coldness towards life,
we are too much women to
own to such unwomanliness.


Whorishly with the psychopomp
we play and plead—and say
nothing of this later. And our dreams,


with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.

I have decided I am mad at you.
And it does not even matter.
I do not even care.
Your words have repulsed me like raw onions.
No take backs.
Druken fools.
Druken tools.
Which ones are we?