foreplay

Another poet friend wrote she was glad I wasn’t really writing a poem a day because it made her feel as if she weren’t producing enough.

Well, don’t worry – no one any good ever writes a poem a day forever, or at the very least doesn’t write a good poem every day.

Here are my 2000s yearly poem counts – as you can see, it’s all over the place, from a single poem to 77 a year. In our three years of travel I wrote 30 poems, while in the two years we’ve been back I wrote 104. My previous best year was 2005 when I was writing poems to musically jam with Peter Ball, then Mom died, and finally Lady came into my life — three excellent muses.

2000 – 1
2001 – 3
2002 – 3
2003 – 16
2004 – 27
2005 – 56
2006 – 18
2007 – 4
2008 – 8
2009 – 24
2010 – 77
20011 – 3 so far

Here’s a poem with deliciously sliding sounds from 1987.

Foreplay

Freud comes tonight
to mock our mere
reflected lives’
refracted fear,
shelf dependents
miming mirror
of every man and action.

In abstinence
such sibilance
through undue trade
and undulance
calls forth
in outlawed ambulance
emotional transaction.

These scars we horde
until they’re heard
to bargain bare
a binding word,
the players paid
and pompous lured
to daily dead transgression.

Nipples rise
through lemon dust
raw, red
and real in sapient lust,
emasculate tongues
court and musk
mother’s moist application.