85 Lust and desire poems

How can I keep my maidenhead, My maidenhead, my maidenhead; How can I keep my maidenhead, Among sae mony men, O. The Captain bad a guinea for’t, A guinea for’t, a guinea for’t, The Captain bad a guinea for’t, The Colonel he bad ten, O. But I’ll do as my minnie did, My minnie did, my minnie did, But I’ll do as my minnie did, For siller I’ll hae nane, O. I’ll gie it to a bonie lad, A bonie lad, a bonie lad; I’ll gie it to a bonie lad, For just as gude again, O. An auld moulie maidenhead, A maidenhead, a maidenhead; An auld moulie maidenhead, The weary wark I ken, O. The stretchin’ o’t, the strivin’ o’t, The borin o’t, the rivin’ o’t, And ay the double drivin o’t, The farther ye gang ben, O.

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones, and such a last light—full of spheres and zones. August, you're just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

Sheets entangle him Naked on his bed Like a toppled mast Slack sails bedeck At sea, no ballast For that even keel He cannot keep— No steering wheel As he falls asleep

i want her tin skin. i want her militant barbie breast, resistant, cupped, no, cocked in the V of her elbow. i want my curves mountainous and locked. i want her arabesque eyes, i want her tar markings, her curlicues, i want her tin skin. she is a tree, her hair a forest of strength. i want to be adorned with bottles. i want my brownness to cover all but the silver edges of my tin skin. my sculptor should have made me like her round-bellied maker hewed her: with chain- saw in hand, roughly. cut away from me everything but the semblance of tender. let nothing but my flexed foot, toeing childhood, tell the night-eyed, who know how to look, what lies within. —after alison saar’s “compton nocturne”

Do I fuck you or hate you? It feels wrong in every limb But I do it anyway ’Cause it feels right when you’re in. Your generosity is perverse And confined to your bed The only thing you’ve given me freely Is head. White Boots,2014 by Rachel Louise Hodgson

for some it is stone bare smooth as a buttock rounding into the crevasse of the world for some it is extravagant water   mouths wide washing together forever   for some it is fire for some air and for some certain only of the syllables it is the element they search their lives for eden for them it is a test

Thus every Creature, and of every Kind, The secret Joys of sweet Coition find: Not only Man’s Imperial Race; but they That wing the liquid Air, or swim the Sea, Or haunt the Desert, rush into the flame: For Love is Lord of all; and is in all the same. ’Tis with this rage, the Mother Lion stung, Scours o’re the Plain; regardless of her young: Demanding Rites of Love, she sternly stalks; And hunts her Lover in his lonely Walks. ’Tis then the shapeless Bear his Den forsakes; In Woods and Fields a wild destruction makes. Boars whet their Tusks; to battle Tygers move; Enrag’d with hunger, more enrag’d with love. Then wo to him, that in the desert Land Of Lybia travels, o’re the burning Sand. The Stallion snuffs the well-known Scent afar; And snorts and trembles for the distant Mare: Nor bitts nor Bridles, can his rage restrain; And rugged Rocks are interpos’d in vain. He makes his way o’re Mountains, and contemns Unruly Torrents, and unfoorded Streams. The bristled Boar, who feels the pleasing wound, New grinds his arming Tusks, and digs the ground. The sleepy Leacher shuts his little Eyes; About his churning Chaps the frothy bubbles rise: He rubs his sides against a Tree; prepares And hardens both his Shoulders for the Wars.

When she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. She drips herself with water, and her shoulders Glisten as silver, they crumple up Like wet and falling roses, and I listen For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals. In the window full of sunlight Concentrates her golden shadow Fold on fold, until it glows as Mellow as the glory roses.

For T.S. Whose hands touched, first, the head of the penis, the shaft? And was it soft or shale?  More rock than clay. And who pinched first into their place the small cups at the base of the ass? Who was it got down there, on whose knees, and blew— and was that passion or panic, the machine that drove those exhalations? —and how could we rate the power of that breath—breeze or gale or a whisper like the song the little boy sings to the beetle, whose small legs moved in tune like his legs, the legs on that first body, must have moved, if they did move, when the dust settled. In my mind everything’s become enormous. But was it ever small like that, the first body? Did it ever sit close to the ants and their piles of dirt from which that body had come? You were a small boy once, I suppose. You were dirty from the start. You showed me how to use a cock ring, and why. How, without ever paying for a room, to spend two weeks in any city. How two men could fuck and continue to face each other directly —took my body and showed me, my back on a table, my knees by my head. Stretched me into seeing you were more than a dog. You must be dead by now, though I don’t know whose hands prepared you. Whose fingers fingered, for the final time, all that dark and kinky hair? If the first body was made of dirt, in order to plumb the hollow of that first throat, whose thumb first lodged inside the hinge of that first mouth to force it open? To make the tongue, so it could work, who shoved inside that mouth the shit of a hundred thousand worms?

You have a beautiful mouth, Luigi, the man-boy says. The rubber raft has floated far from shore. The choice is this: medusa sea, a boil of   jellied lashes, or face the kiss.