Needled fingered hematologists prepare our dinner. Her name, Mercy, all body candy, tattooed with a snake ****. Her ******* pierced with rose paved sparkles and ******* stabbed with bat shaped studs. Nurses sharpen knives while quack doctors tend to little plastic dolls and blood bathers with crossed femurs in hospital beds where they are cultivated as condiments. Between the umbilicus of limbo, and the theater of cruelty the rational world remains a derelict void. Welcome are hallucinations that abolish reason, that give meaning to blood shot gazing eyes beyond the limits of sanity, where madness cannot be opposed in a world of tug a war monsters and gods. Lyrical voices of demons shoot through Mercy's nerve membranes, while a marching army of squat shadows move like flames in a vacant lot of burning violets. Monsters groan. A snake head eats its own tail in graves of scattered voices and speechless tongues. Arteries pulse vermillion, naked and wanton waiting to be pierced for sanity's release in a lyric of dread's desire. A tidal force lifts a dirigible from hell in a fountain of blood while Jesus has a cheeseburger moonstruck in torn *******. A spreading bride dissolves hoop-armed around a formless shadow hallucinating her beloved killers foot stones kiss. Mercy Kneels on the Dias subserviently. She is sumptuous and a willing betrothal in a gauzy white gown. Happily, headed for death, she disrobes and centers herself on the long knotty table spreading wide smiling, as if a performing dancer, a naked contortionist in a shadow that flickers. Her knees bent to her chest, ******* heaving, her red rose toes pointed, feet arched. She is ready for the final churning and dispatch. Vampires with moonish eyes crouch on all fours like ancient bushman with black wings like hovering capes to eat her with little teasing bites and licks before kissing hisses and insinuating their bifurcated tongues followed by needling punctures that look like spider holes with reddish volcanic mounds and a leaking web of blood rivulets on her pink primrose pudenda "blood on a sugar cube" mouths, feeding mouths, feeding mouths, licking each other's claret tongues mixed with foot kissing adorations and pinkish toes red blooms and  mad mumblings about the grace of Satan while burning black sabbath candles and incense, uncrossing themselves in cosmic Goetic rituals during devotional masturbations and copulations to give thanks and pay homage for fear that their god would take their girl away, their lovely girl food dressed in hemoglobin crystals, their sweet bleeding lover at fangs point, their peaches and cream, robe of blood and starve them.
Vampires are like the rest of us, hunger always wins, hunger for beauty, hunger for love, attention and shelter, hunger for every ******* thing. The vampires wept tears of gratitude licking torn sumptuous flesh like wild cats on the Savana. The pain of their bites excited Mercy, oh it hurt so, while they filled blood goblets of her, weeping and tumbling downwards in her honeymoon crypt like a spooling galaxy as they ate her belly, throat, eyes, and **** with their switchblade kisses. Mercy drugged on ketamine pushed passed the unendurable limits past limitless pain, like a burning witch laughing thinking in fractured clouds, and hot *** heaping ******* at the site of her depraved condition before sinking into an impenetrable dark water labyrinth of death. Her lips glossed black, the color of the grave, her hair dyed red and purple, her thighs and belly trussed in white gauze by ladies in waiting. Her areoles scorched and punctured as incense holders. Vampires coalesce, with fangs and ravaging kisses, biting Mercy like wild hyenas with panicked raw mouths of red saliva diamonds. Mercy gushes blood like a red river banquet, chained and strapped, legs stirrup wide, her feet beautifully arched and just so, glistening for fiendish kisses. In a candlelight ritual she is copulated by both sexes and fed upon. Mercy laughs like a loon screaming as she is lapped up by the wicked gift of ravenous tongues. Half devoured she emerges, a blood perfume delirium. Mercy arches upward and writhes in a blistering frenzy. Her eyes glare like a tempest then go vacant in loop tee loops in and out of focus. Her mouth, a red licorice lipstick smudge, gapes like twisted wire and pierced blood-soaked lips. In a ghastly shriek Mercy's belly oozes while the very last of her falters. Mercy surrenders her remains in a last hideous lament. Her hair looks like matted steel wool, her nostrils wet with mucousy brine. Her eyes bulge from their sockets, while a single smoldering finger in flames still burns as if it is a candle. Mercy tumbles downwards like a spooling galaxy as they eat her belly, throat, eyes, *** **** and nibble on her toes while she lays prone on a worn blood-stained porcelain Dias and spreads wide exposing whats left of her innocent bottom and smiling like a bewitched demon.

You can't talk about love
without talking about its absence, deceit, desire and perversions.

Despite Justines intention to live a virtuous and moral life
she repeatedly encounters debauched and depraved individuals
who demean her in every sense of the word.

Justine is brutally and incessantly violated, yet always eager and docile with big ******* eyes like portals of magick.
Using lunar rituals and oneiric transmissions she masturbates incessantly in alley doorways while imagining being backdoored in a bathtub of slippery *****.

A queen of pinups and a scape goat without a safe word
She is held hostage by desire interlocking her with a **** vampire
living in a stone-cold chamber who texted pitiful Instagram posts about beautiful scarification, the mimetic pleasures of narcissism and beauty that left her always feeling like her own undertaker.

How does it work to protect yourself from yourself in this bitter city of the mind where silver flies, pocked faces and little worthless pennies in knotted dreams hum into the cells of your mottled brain?

Aside from my love of women who own their sexuality and being the spawn of the solar phallus dragon and ***** **** of fire, you know mom and dad, let's face it a lot of people are pent up about ***, so anything illuminating on the subject and its various forms, perspectives, sensual aspects and subculture is nothing but a good thing unless of course you are a die-hard *****.

Broadly speaking marrieds and long-term couples grow bored with each other, and singles very often go without *** or even being touched for extended periods of time. In both cases it ***** and not in a good way. Many singles remain fixated on the idea of finding that special person to alleviate their sense of loneliness and many if not most marrieds remain starved for a bit of novelty and are understandably afraid to transgress for fear of the jealousy and pain of betrayal with the loneliness and insecurity it often brings. Of course, there are some who work hard to disown their sexuality all together as a solution.  I see this as a kind ****** & emotional suicide, a moral masochism if religiously motivated and crime against the self.  There is in fact very few of us who manage to find a way to have it all and have it that way most or all of the time. In other words, the entirety of our society has a baked in structure that creates a sense of pervasive despair about ****** desire, not to mention the immense suffering that comes with loving and not being loved back.

Speaking of moral masochism, I find it ironic that the clergy who are sworn to celibacy and outwardly kowtow to the most rigid repressive codes of behavior have been and remain appalling in their rampant *******.

Perhaps whats left is to be driven into a labyrinth of hermetically sealed shadows that incubate a kind of sensual theater of transgression and taboo where simply everything goes.
Well, this writer has lived in those shadows like many others and consequently decided to explore those dark corners both in relationships, and those interior grottos of self through mental construct phantasmagorias and the language of poetry to spotlight this web of pathogens built into the very scaffolding of our psyches and culture.
As a poet I dont want to mimic the ruling culture. I want poetry to be like good ***, as in novel or intimate or perverse or underground like a creepy girl with a little blood on her pigtails in a fluttering dress with great legs just asking for it.
Poetry in its frail orbit is often only seen through the lens of genteel romance, social justice, of documentary, of collective resistance, or perhaps the propaganda of some other public iconography, a kind of literary imperialism in its lock step with the prevailing dogma trend lines while *** remains oddly off the radar? How could that be with so many barking and yelping genitalia, talk about repression.
Is the poetic form collapsing like a drooping mouth from too much pretentious baroque gentility in mildewed assure skies and verdant fields? Has Pandora been dethroned, and stripped of her gloomy yet torrid box of troves?
No folks shes under our bed's, in our brains and DNA disturbing us while we try to avoid her primal groans, groans mind you that manifest in the shadows and then erupt into arguments, tears and the rip apart lives.   

The reason I write about *** is I'm in search of a sacred space where language serves the psyche without artifice, and that makes plain the difference between the conservative public conversation and true innerness of the intersectional shadow lands of self towards a better way to live.

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world - The master calls a butterfly".
Richard Bach

He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ******* wet dreaming into a thousand ***** pink and smooth as sea shells.
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry for quite a few years and maybe this is just me, as in some quirky bias I suffer, or misapprehension about poetry, but much of what I read doesn’t feel much like poetry at all. Now, one can rightfully argue that poetry can be anything, and that’s okay because if we take a look at poetry’s history what we see is a continuum of thesis and antithesis, flagging us who read the stuff that anything goes. So where does that leave us? I might argue that since there are so many distinct kinds of poems that a definition alludes us all together and when we hear the noun p o e t r y, we can only assign the familiar poetic shape as its definitive territory, meaning a few words in a line that are stacked up on each other, which we generally think of as verse with multiplied stacks fulfilling our expectation of poem. I’m thinking if we want to go with that poetry digresses to a linguistic charmless flat land characteristic of prose, relative to at least some of the poetic writing that is highly lyrical, sonically potent, novel, intonated, linguistically muscular, and dynamically connective to the reader. Poetry can take creative liberties that prose customarily does not or cannot take. Poetry may have different linguistic needs like different kinds of English. For example, articles may be absent towards a more concentrated synthesis for phrasing, a lyrical lilt, stream of consciousness boarding on the abstract et al.
Being a poet is born of a feeling that a face may be a liquid surface. That time is malleable, and that there is always something going on in-between the lines gleaned from inexplicable moments of inner disjuncture or a hesitating breath.
Poetry may facilitate that mind may emerge from the concrete objective into the mirrors of the marvelous or uncanny like a burped half avocado and fish head at 2 am in the morning transmuting into a torrent of dormice and angels in delirious avenues of falling stars and looking glasses.
Poetry may address intersectional dimensionality populated by visions and voices of primordial undercurrents, that stories may not lend themselves to. Poetry may be metalinguistic and a fragment of the inner life both collective and individuated. Poetry may work from the inside out without referencing the temporal, locational, and name it and claim it nouns and pronouns typical of prose. So, here’s the poetry problem. Why is it that 99% of the poetry I read here and places like it remain basically written just like prose, linguistically and sonically vacuous, largely bereft of similes, metaphors and all the other strategic devices that can make poetry progressive, inventive and deeply resonate, except of course that they are stacked and columned giving the appearance of poems?
~~~~~
EXAMPLES OF POEMS THAT CAN BE CALLED POETRY
Ballad in A
BY CATHY PARK HONG
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan ******* scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s *****,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a **** mass war path.
Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ***
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag ***** at half-mast.~~~~~
Ocean of Earth

BY GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
TRANSLATED BY RON PADGETT
To G. de Chirico
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes
House of dampness
House of burning
Season’s fastness
Season singing
The airplanes are laying eggs
Watch out for the dropping of the anchor
Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
And is never still
Translated from the French
Source: Poetry (October 2015)~~~~~

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
BY OCEAN VUONG
i
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest.
i
You, drowning
between my arms —
stay.
You, pushing your body
into the river
only to be left
with yourself —
stay.
i
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in ******, was the closest thing
to surrender.
i
Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d **** for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.
i
Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.
i
I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.
i
Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.
i
In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.
i
In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.
Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.
i
It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
beside a body
must make a field
full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
being set back another hour
& morning
finds our clothes
on your mother’s front porch, shed
like week-old lilies.
Source: Poetry (December 2014)
~~~~~
SOMETIMES WE’VE GOT TO READ IT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS.

pre-*******
******
and
everything
you ever wanted to know
about yeast infections

Just kidding
but poems make you feel thoughts