Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber
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“I drown in the
drumming ploughland
—Ted Hughes
“The Hawk in the Rain”
The Hawk in the Rain

Grizzled lizardy wrinkled—
Auden bending down over his drink
There in the Faber & Faber
Stairwell toasting Miss Eliot

What am I doing here—
Mincing words with these
Queer Queenly Old Poets so
Wasted by The Waste Land?
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Gesticulating weak wrists—
Old male whores in the Attic
Prissy Prostitutes cruising
Like hard-up Concubines?

“Lechery I simply despise”—
I told Sylvia, “But getting my
Book published by Faber, well,
I’ll do anything, baby.”
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Sylvia got jealous as usual—
The Faber Queens putting the
Make on me, her Yorkshire
Gigolo poet husband

Valerie felt me up—
The swank party in Eliot’s flat
Blathering away about how
Prufrock couldn’t get it up

Cambridge

“swallowing of
the earth’s mouth”
—Ted Hughes
“The Hawk in the Rain”
The Hawk in the Rain

Drowning in the dreary remains—
All the graves of long-dead Poets
I waited for the weightless Dead
Their stubborn closets to disgorge

A definite downer at Cambridge—
Down to the bone-dazed Earth’s
Masturbating English Departments
Where diamond dice were thrown
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Sylvia grabbed me, wanted me—
Hurled herself down in my arms
Typing me into the Mytholmroyd
Monster, the jaded Beast I became

In her desperation to have me—
Incestuously like Big Bad Daddy
She resorted to Black Cat Magic
I became the Jaguar eating her up

Nightingales

“Apeneck Sweeny
spreads his knees”
—T. S. Eliot
“Sweeny Among the
Nightingales”

Apeneck Auden spreads—
His cheeks down on his knees
His tight puckered asshole
Only to ready to please

The young sailor in the park—
Slides it sideways then up
Deep into the River Platte
Thru the Poet’s horny gate
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Miss Auden isn’t ready—
Her xylophone vertebrae
Doing the Rumba down to Rio
But finally something splits

The Wisteria weeps—
The sacred fissure bleeds
The surgeon has to sew and
Stitch the gnash back up

Love Song

“In the room
the women come
and go talking of
Michelangelo”
—T. S. Eliot
“The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock”

Let us go then, prowling—
When the evening slinks
About, the tricks etherized
On half-deserted streets

The muttering queens—
Restless one-night stands
In cheap motels sucking
Oysters and faux-pearls
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The faggy fog rubs—
The back of your neck
Licking its tongue and
Lingering in your loins

Knowing you should—
Be curled up in bed
With your wife back
Home safe and sound
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But there isn’t time—
For a hundred indecisions
The days are murdered
By lies and deceits

Not time to come and go—
Swishing like Michelangelo
Beneath the Sistine Chapel
Scaffolding high above
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No time to turn back—
To peel a peach-fuzz angel
To measure out one’s life
With coy coffee spoons

Far be it for me—
To presume catty
Badboy butt-ends for
My days to come
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Down the nightly—
Narrow streets ending up
Ragged crab claws scuttling
Across bathroom floors

I’ve wept and feasted—
Prayed and preyed until
I was old and bald-headed
Mealy-mouthed & toothless
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Was it really worth it—
All that marmalade & tea
Squeezing young unicorns dry
Doing those centaurs on the sly?:

Hoping against coming back—
Like Lazarus from the Dead
Only for another dreary
Rerun of the same old thing?