The Poetry of Cunt

the poet martin wrote: one more thing,
where I'm from cunt is
about the worst word imaginable. you
seem to use it tenderly and I'm not
trying to be funny. what's
the deal there?

the poet janice wrote: vagina sounds
too clinical, pussy purrs and generally
I don't like felines. vagina’s a name
for a quim queen or a prairie cunt. to regulate, ground
for sneaking out and coming home past one–vagina!
you’re grounded, don’t you know how
to manage your parts? grounded
for a month, tucked away in a closet,

and the chick with the disgraced cunt walks
wilted wearing pink so all the kids know
if they peek under her skirt and
crinolines, there’s an empty space or worse,
a prosthetic vagina. an adult ashamed
might choose vagina, a word

whose first letter hides near the end
of the alphabet, but whose last
is first, cause you just can’t get away
from a cunt, even saying the word aloud
has guts and bravado. Now,

I can call a man a prick,
"Oh you fucking prick!" while he fondly
boasts about its heated heists and women
waving fans hotly chat about this prick
and that. But a cunt, baby,

is a real living thing, raw sex
and honest. it’s a word
of endearment like I love you sweet
sweetest of cunts, didn’t another
great poet, not named martin–some dude

called Will, compose in a slash
that bit about goodnight sweet cunt and
parting being sweet sorrow, cause you know
it’s true. when a cunt and a prick love each other
there is nothing gonna separate them, not
age, not another woman. that

eye on a prick’s head straight focused
in a taut loving line with a cunt clearly
in front. So I wondered, when
southern martin penned, cunt’s a baaad
word, what the fuck's this man scribbling, does
his cock take offense and if so baby,

cunt cunt cunt million times, it’s about your
cock, martin, with its eye
at the tip, the first line of vision taught,
that tactile tingling line
between a cock and a cunt, something

magnetic, something about love, lust
aching, hope, dreams, something
about trembling, waiting, so
how’s it bad, martin from the south. shy cunts
leave a latch on the door cautiously

opening and if you peek gently in, you’ll catch
sight of a fucking flower bed, a hot house
with tropical plants, Oh this cunt
is a tropical plant shifting colours, so’s
you never quite know

the season or what the weather's
like. you gotta test the temperature, baby,
when you're loving up an authentic cunt, shit
what a word and such a generous welcoming,

taking off the latch, letting
you come right on in and giving
you a tour, sneaking you to the back room, peering
into secret cupboards with glowing treasures so tightly
packed that when you open the door, they fall,

honey baby mine, sinking
into your arms, down to your cock, there really
is a botanical garden inside and a waterfall
to sit under and recite
the poetry of a cunt.

Copyright Colman 2008

Humping Eternally Away

I have this poetry collection I'm editing. This morning I was in a foul mood. I was editing for a four-hundred-and-twenty-pound finanacial wizard who had just emailed me. He says he's mostly muscle, but I know from where his hands sit on his stomach, that there's other stuff sifting around inside him. Maybe it's just his meanness piling up.

Last night I edited his work until my eyes edged out of their sockets with a clear mind to head toward my grandmother's sofa under my living room picture window. Still, I kept editing. This morning I received an email: "This is still loaded with obvious errors. I’m asking again that you not do these edits when you are tired." I reread my edit. Maybe I'd still change one or two sentences, but fuck (and I have to write FUCK although Steve the librarian from Baltimore says he's more selective in his verbal fuck celebrations), grammar and content were without fault. See what the financial man, whose name might be Garth, was pissed off about in his cold unappreciative way was I changed his words! His darlings! The man is turning into a fucking writer, a prima donna in drag.

So I checked out my unpublished poetry collection. Reading my own sex bits eases my mind. I still love editing, and even though I haven't had any in a while, I still adore sex. I like the texture of it. Then I did some research and it seems that sex writing is becoming mainstream. Damn. Gotta get the work out. Fuck fast and hard.

Here's a poem from the collection. An ancient one, true, but refurbished.

He struck her on the left breast, she
opened her legs leering
with her cunt. Cradling
his balls in her hand, she bit
him hard
on the neck

where are you headed, she
asked as he barreled his
way up her ass. To Ireland to shoot
my load he answered, she laughed
and scratched his right thigh, waving

her ass to the sky. He snarled
pumped harder, zipping
out of the room and reappearing
with a black kimono flapping
around him, I’ll try for the Orient

instead. Oh fuck, she said, as he plunged
into her cunt. As long as he was
in her he would never commit
seppuku, so he pumped away through
the night and all the next day and when

he was tired, needing a reprieve, to take
a piss, wolf down a pizza, he couldn’t
get out. So he remains humping
to this day, getting fat eating pizza, French
fries and MacDonald’s, pissing

without a care and who knows what
else while locked in her cunt, pumping
away. Jesus Christ what a bastard, locked
in a cunt, and humping eternally away.

Copyright Colman 2008

Abie Says His Prick's in the Top Two Percent

"Hey," he says, grabbing my ass on the second step leading to the upper floor of the townhouse, and I think, you could have given me a few steps for myself, is that asking too much?—there is our bedroom, bathroom, small bedroom where I write term papers and study and Abie spends occasional all-nighters for courses he deigns to touch with his glorious intellect, and then a larger sun-filled warm bedroom, my baby’s room, except there is no baby.

More and more I am thinking of babies and farms bordering a lake. Last weekend, we drove to a commune near Freelton."We do have some Jewish families in residence," the woman with cropped hair said as she looked at us. "Modelled on the kibbutz, you know. We even have sleeping houses. "You mean . . . ?" I said. "Oh yes," the woman said. "And is there a choice?" I asked. "No," she said, clearing away earthern pottery mugs from a coffee table with a tree stump base. Abie looked my face, ushered me out, opened the car door in an uncharacteristic gesture, and practically shoved me in. He knew I was about to have one of my melt-downs.

I guess, my sense of direction is haphazard ─ I followed my wayward sense of direction, landed in this god-for-saken marriage, and now there is no way out of this tunnel. It’s like the one Abie’s family hid in during for war. One thousand days underground, thirty-six people, first and second cousins, brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles. They had to strip the Baba and grease her so she’d fit down the foxhole. There were streams deep down in the tunnel and prehistoric drawings, and the brothers, Sam, Sholke, and Nissel built a chimney through the trunk of the tree to a top branch. Sixty feet it was. A dentist performed abortions. First cousins married first cousins, and seconds, seconds. At night, the men plumaged fields for potatoes. Most stayed in for one thousand days. When they emerged, they looked at each other and laughed. Their skin had turned blue. Of course they also cried. And Abie’s mother, Chana, not knowing if the man she had married just before she slid down the fox hole and whom she heard was taken to Siberia─Siberia!─was still alive. So she dressed as a nun, that she might be spared from harm, meaning rape and death, and set out from Poland, across Russia, to Siberia. Jose had been eating rats to survive, but he was alive. And after all that, in her fifties and firmly established in her Cote St. Luc bungalow, although she would have loved to live in TMR with her wealthy brothers, Chana was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Three months and she was gone. She climbed on the silver table for her radiation treatment and her heart gave out. Her husband remarried within a year. He was used to being taken care of. He’s ninety-one now and waiting to join Chana.

The Baba wrote a book “We Fight to Survive.” Abie says she left out all the good stuff, the marauding and killing and sex. The uncles didn’t keep her in the loop. It’s said that Nissel could pick up a horse with one hand. He’s dead now. But he was never bent or stooped over. I keep telling Abie he has to write the book. He says he has to interview all the uncles and Sonya and Pepe in New York, as well as Henya, his mother’s sister. "Before they die," he says. “I’m going to tell this story,” he says. “And it will be better and bigger than any Dr. Zhivago.” Every so often he makes phone calls to producers. He has contacts.

I have to hand it to him; this one he could do. At first he talks about it every week, then once a month. He tells me it’s going to be a classic. "You’ll act in it," he says. "Maybe it will be your big break." Those acting surges wash over me, making me weak in the knees. Now’s the time I could fuck him, but he keeps on talking. I can’t see movies, can’t go to plays. The screen credits get blurry and I sob when the actors take their bows. “The most gifted young talent," Leon Major had said. Although I screwed up at the Saidye Bronfman centre – Louise Marleau was starring in the "Doll’s House" and Trudeau was in the audience, first row centre. Gina who was having an affair with a slight blond set manager slipped backstage in her black pantsuit and whispered grandly, “You’ll never believe . . . " I was the maid. I figured if Eisenstein could create memorable bits parts for his players, so could I, but when I entered stage left and looked at Nora all dressed in her finery, I forgot my lines. She repeated her lines. I used my character to get flustered, curtsied twice, burst into tears, and excused myself. The audience clapped. “Don’t you ever ad lib on me again, do you hear me?” Louise hissed. Robin Ward patted me on the shoulder, “You did good kid,” he said. “Never mind.”

I even auditioned for the National Theatre School. “You didn’t get in,” Abie told me straight out one morning in our Bourret Avenue kitchen. “You needed three out of three votes. You got two. One thought your emotions were too powerful. It would be hard to match you up. They chose David Lazarus instead."
“What? He has no soul and he talks in a flat line.
"And Alan Migicovsky."
“You gotta be kidding me. He walks with his ego up his ass, and he crimps his hair."
“I know, Abie said. "I know." And then he called Pluto and we sat the three of us, as I cried on Abie’s shoulder and into Pluto’s fur. We sat like that for a few hours, then Abie said “I have to take a leak."

Constance Brown kept me on. She wanted me to see this director for a lead in a CinePix movie.
"What's your sign?" the director asked me and I said "Pisces."
"It figures," he said.
"I'm Aries," and then he paused. I hadn't a clue what all that meant, so I just stood there nodding meaningfully.
"Do you do nude scenes?" he asked.
“I do not,” I said.
“Aw, you’re kidding me,” he said.
“You’ll have to get a stand in,” I said.
“Won’t you show me a bit of leg?” he said, and I said, “Well, OK,” and I lifted my mother’s burgundy dress to mid-thigh.

The next day I phoned Constance. “That’s it for me,” I said. “This is not my scene.”
“It may not be your scene, but it’s part of the scene,” she said. “You’d have the lead.” The movie did well in Quebec. And really it wasn’t even soft porn. But when I heard that, I was already in Guelph, enrolled in early childhood development, a five-year B.A.Sc. honours program. And Abie was either sleeping or eating or calling "Janice where are you?" or "Are you ever coming to bed?"
And I'd yell up, "That's because you're watching TV."
"You have any better alternatives?"
I guess that's why I stayed. I didn't have any better alternatives.

I wander from room to room, into the bedroom to change my clothes, through the hallway in my Tyrolean hiking boots, to the living room doorway─black cotton backdrop stapled to one wall, mattress dressed up in orange and red Indian print beneath, green and blue shag Danish rug on the floor, morning snow outside the picture window. I lie face down on the orange rough wool sofa, then on my side, rearranging my legs to slightly bent, hips curving.

“Where are you?” I whisper. “If you love me, you’d be here. Come here if you really love me. I peak into the bedroom. He’s sleeping, his pale fat leering at me. I hate and love him. I take off my clothes and slide into bed. I know if he wakes up from my warm body pressing against his, he won’t be angry. But then he’ll want to fuck me, and I’m OK with that today; I’m tired of zig-zag flying and I figure fucking will help me land and glide into a gentle stop.

Leaving home. Green car filled with boxes and mismatched suitcases from my father’s collection. I was always homesick at camp. My first summer at Manitou-Wabing I cried every night for a week straight. I kept everyone awake, including Loren Deckelbaum who was the sweetest kid I ever met, then and ever since. In the second week, I took the train home and then I cried so hard to return that my mother drove me to Windsor Station and put me on the train back to camp. I pulled my two duffle bags across the main field to our cabin, opened the screen door and announced “I’m back." No one looked up, except for Lauren who welcomed me with that gentle smile of hers. For the rest of the summer, I cried inconsolably for my grandfather. Now I’m homesick even before the sign that says Welcome to Ontario.

“What?” Abie says as I turn my head and stare out at the flat land passing by, one horizontal landscape perfectly aligned with the next.
“You know it’s not that I hated them,” I say.
“Speak English,” he says, “What’re you talking about?'
“My parents. It’s not that I hated them or like I didn’t feel loved, you know. It was expressions of love. Expressions, that I needed.”
What’d you expect? They’re goys.”
“They are not goys and anyhow I hate that word.
“You wouldn’t know the difference,” Abie says and turns up the radio.
“You know I threw out all my writing from the top drawer in my grandfather’s desk before we got married. I figured I should start fresh. There was a paper with burnt edges that my cousin Linda wrote on with invisible ink.
“So how’d you see it then?'
“You had to light a candle and heat up the paper from underneath without burning it.”
"You’re burning me, Abie, you know that?”
I’m a self-made orphan.
"You never left your acting behind, did you? Packed up all your melodrama to bring to Guelph with you."
“Well you should be fine, you’ve got your TV and Gerka knife."
"You’ll thank me one day,” he says.

I don’t thank him. Ever. He’s in love with his TV. He flips channels and calls out for tea with lemon, for pretzels, sometimes he announces shows. “Hey, you’ll really like this,” he says and delivers a sport caster’s play by play. Usually I say I’m busy, I’m studying, working on a term paper. I despise that TV. Abie skips classes. He drops out of courses. I take my mother’s calls in the kitchen.
“Tell her my father is increasing what he gives us,” he whispers, his breath hot in my ear.
“Tell her,” he says. “my father is increasing to forty a week.
I cover the mouth piece, jerk my shoulder up, and turn around.
“Tell her,” he says more loudly this time. And then he opens the fridge which is empty and points inside.

My father has this deal. He’ll help us out, alright, but only equal to what Abie’s father gives. At first, Abie’s father gave us twenty-five dollars a week, but now he sends cash presents on holidays. I know Abie won’t let up until I say something, and later he’s going to tell me my father forgets where he came from and what he married into. And I’m going to say, “And how are you any different?” My grandfather on my father’s side was a shoemaker. Abie’s father sells kosher chickens.

“The trouble with you,” I going to say, “is you feel entitled." I think it’s important for him to know. Before we left Montreal, Abie phoned Dr. Wisebord. "Is she going to be alright?" he asked. "I've done everything I could," Dr. Wisebord said, which Abie translated as she's crazy as a loon. There's an old black and white movie where the husband drives his wife crazy and has her committed. I don't remember the name of the film or who starred in it. My selective memory didn't swoop down and snatch those particulars. I guess it was too close to home.

While the Librarian Sleeps

A librarian from Baltimore sent
me news about John the Plumber or
was it Jack, seems he’s not
really a plumber, did you see how
McCain’s right cheek juts
out like a wrecked ship or
like a pirate har har

did I tell you that even the stars
are sleeping and yet I tap,
a woman dressed in a black
wool turtleneck and unbuckled
jeans worrying about outcomes while
Joe and the librarian sleep.

For My New Baltimore Man

A hookers dark green shawl embraces my shoulders where a man's arms might be, his head nesting on my right shoulder, his chin digging into the earth of my middle deltoid, seeking out a depth of six inches as prescribed for fall planting. "You'll see flowers in the spring just after the snow melts," he promises. Have I given up on the outcomes of such swollen vows?

Besides, I'm not thinking of snow. Last winter my vehicle was lodged in an icy snow bank at the alley entrance off Galley Avenue. Two powerfully minded female college students majoring in phys.ed. couldn't budge my bulky Honda CRV. The radio reported the storm as the worst in decades.

"Stop being such a pussy," my ex said, "rock it, don't rev your wheels."
"Will you help me?" I said and reminded him how I swooped in to save him from five more evictions, bringing his personal total to eleven.

He refused. It was too cold, too late; it was too far. "Forget it," I said and called for a tow truck. I'm not bitter. It shrivels up a face and being sixty does not white-out vanity. I figure my stash of years left may cover two and a half decades, and if I'm frugal, maybe more. Meanwhile, I’m trying to settle into this new number, just slide right in easy-like, smooth base to base, but I fucking can’t calm down. Wait. There are moments:

when my cunt yawns and greets me in the morning
when the day ends and my bipolar daughter lies quietly sleeping in the room adjacent to the family room
when I wear my worn olive green t-shirt that parades my tits
when I feel my breasts all full of love and longing
when I remember the colour of Jimmy Bob’s cock and add to that Garth’s spreading balls, not to forget his prick that reminds me of redwoods although I’ve never seen one
when I hear John Gorka singing “The One Who Got Away” and I think of you.

Sex, Love, and Lies at Sixty

It's like this. I've been writing, feeling good; my nipples are islands with clear water surrounding, separate from adjacent land; thoughts about a writer/photographer who says I have a sweet soul. "Hey man, you haven't read my words," I write, and he says he has; he's read my work online. "Oh no," I write, "I was just a baby then, hadn't learned the art of deep throat. I can now tickle myself to death with the tip of a cock." Actually I never wrote those words. The man is a librarian, requests commentators on his blog to refrain from writing profanities --- you mean muf, fuck, cunt, vagi burger and side dishes like ass fucking or political shit --- Bush, Cheney, Lenny Kay, Randy Best, and the rest of those hoodlums?

The photographer says my past comes with me, informs my present, and motivates me to pursue my future. Which is fine with me because I want to share sex and life at sixty and beyond, sort of a head's up, although I'm not the one with the cock and I can say I've seen a few, closing my eyes to summon up images of favorites. Skinny cocks have no heart; it's the thicker ones whose hearts beat out uncommon tunes. And balls, well, balls will give your truth away every time: snug walnut balls held tightly up, refusing to leave home, or those wondrous spreading ones, rambling with lives of their own.

Anyhow, one morning (or did I say night?), I was chatting with my daughter Lisa who has been my muse since her birth and probably before. "Lisa, honey," I said. "I have an idea for a new blog."

She turned in her teak chair that is part of an outdoor set I use indoors so I can imagine sitting en famille somewhere in Southern France, while I'm washing dishes upstairs in this ancient downtown Toronto house. "And what about your other one? You shoving that one?"

"I knew you were going to say that" I said. "It's a blog, exercise, like warming up at the gym before hardcore training. You see?"

Lisa wasn't convinced.

Sex, Love, and Politics: Intro, Part 1

Two days ago, sometime in the morning, I was sitting on the toilet where I often do most of my most profound thinking --- also in the shower, driving, and sleeping. This mind will not stay still which is why I resist bathing, am troubled with a distended bladder, disturbed sleep, siphon my meager savings toward automobile repair, and fart a lot. And I thought of the article Garth sent me. Of course his real name isn't Garth; he's a financial whizz with an online presence, twenty-two years younger than I am, and he's got the sweetest pair of spreading balls I've ever seen or sucked.

The title of the article was "The Thrill is Gone." Something about aging and the related emotional levelling off. I thought about that for a while and reached a grand realization two days ago after releasing a four-hour span of accumulated urine.

Later in the day, after supper, I spoke to Lisa my cool daughter who lives in the main floor unit of this ninety-six years old Victorian house.