posted September 25, 2009 10:35 AM         

When I was yours, your curse was new.
At first there were only patches of fur,
soft and vulnerable, every other moon.
In the beginning only one eye changed
to that feral, alarming yellow; frantic
and hungry in the absence of light.

Regardless, I loved you piously.
I laid my throat beside your jaws nightly
and never feared the part of you
that the ignorant called evil.

Those nights when I'd wake up alone
only to find you at the dining table
half naked and spitting blood,
I never shamed you for where you'd been.
I'd wrap my fingers tenderly
around your savage claws and lead you
wordlessly upstairs to bed.

Somewhere in the fields beyond your fence
the corpses of rabbits and barn mice
were rotting as we made love.

-------------

Loving The Wolf-boy, II

In secret I loved the animal differently,
more intensely, than I did the man.
I confess I would pretend to sleep
so I could watch, out of one eye,
your body change in the low light.
I'd feel myself go hot in hearing
your frantic weight on the stairs
tearing out into the dark streets
to devour and destroy; my monster.

I was never more lustful for you
then when you still smelled of them;
the times you'd let me trace
their vainly defensive bite marks
and futile, terrified scratches
across your body with my tongue.

Surely no one in this world
was as beautiful and terrible
as you and I then, tasting death
on the fat lip of love.

------------

Loving The Wolf-boy, III

I always knew that when you left me,
you would say it was for my safety.
Though I swore to you that any death
at the hands of your tragic strength
would be an honor; you left me anyway,
as I slept, awaiting your grisly return.

I was slowly maddened by grief, tracing
my fingers down the deep and dire
scratches you left along the stairwell.
I spent countless evenings alone
face down on the shag carpeting,
imagining you, weeping,
touching myself.

On better days, when the fog lifts,
I wake to find myself stumbling
through the streets of our city,
stroking my mink coat for comfort
and searching maniacally
for your old, troubled softness;
in the sunset on the Sturgeon Moon,
or the sad, childlike eyes of dogs
tied to fire hydrants in the snow.

-------------

Our Wolf-boy, Revisited

In my photographs of her she holds
her body so close to other bodies:
her arm around a friend, her forehead
rested on a shoulder, and always
eye contact. She found that so easy.

I remember her clearly that way:
almost dumbly intimate. I still wake
sometimes thinking I feel her
closed much too safely around me;
familiar but somehow fictitious,
like memories of childhood birthdays.

I would watch her as she slept and imagine
her coming together in reverse; her veins
over her muscle over her bones, imagining
her blood pumping so warmly. A ghost,
she cared for me during my transformation
as if she had no other purpose when
her true fate had always been that intimacy
and the ease with which she displayed it.

And me
I was always the monster;
all my life I'd found comfort in nothing
apart from the primitive sadness
I could so easily cause in others.
This lunar business started off
as only more of the same; I'd heard
of a man who at times became a beast,
and in doing so lost any control
he once had over his instincts
and all power over his cruelty.

In truth, I only went to the woods
that night seeking kinship, seeking
some starting point from which
to launch myself into something
more real, more wise, more feminine
than the thing I'd always been.

posted September 25, 2009 11:02 AM         

A poet has come to Lindaland.

Beautiful and impressive, aerial.

You should be writing, and writing.
This isn't a hobby for you,
as it is for me.

Forgive me for being technical:

Here: "I was never more lustful for you
then when you still smelled of them;"

You want "than", not "then".

----------------------

posted September 27, 2009 10:39 AM         

I've been published here and there but generally I just sit on my work and edit it ad nauseum. I've been in a terrible block since I had my son, though. Any tips on how to break it out?

posted September 29, 2009 01:59 PM         

quote:

---

I've been in a terrible block...
Any tips on how to break it out?

---

Fall in love.

Travel,
or, at least,
take day trips.

Go to museums
or see good movies.

Read, read, read.

Take mushrooms.

Smoke weed.

Sleep more.

Get a colonic,
or do a cleanse.

Eat/live healthier.

Wait for the time
to be right/ripe.

Yeah.

quote:

---

"Surfacing" by Margaret Atwood

---

No. I'll Google.

I wanna read "Perfume"
by Patrick Suskind.
Or maybe "American Gods"
by Neil Gaiman.

posted September 29, 2009 02:52 PM         

Also "Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson; If you haven't read this already, I have a feeling you will really, really like it. It also deals in Gods and Monsters.

posted October 01, 2009 11:45 AM         

I think the problem is that the dichotomy is almost impossible to reconcile- like you said, Valus, fragmented beings. This is a seriously old existential issue, too; people have been wrestling with this as far back as recorded history can take us (the mythology of the Garden of Eden, for example). Because human beings are animals, yeah; but we have qualities (individuality, creativity, romantic love, intellectualism, guilt, regret, etc) which set us apart from all other animals as well.

You look at an animal and you see that animal has absolutely no conflicting feelings about it's life purpose. It knows exactly what it's on earth to do, and does so naturally. Human beings, on the other hand have so much leisure, so much knowledge, and are so segregated from the divine that we battle each other/ourselves constantly trying to figure out what we all, inherently, already know inside of us somewhere-- just like every other animal. I think that's the strongest basis for attraction to animalism, and unleashing your cruelty on to the world. You don't have to wonder anymore whether you're "doing what you're meant to do." You're just doing to do, you just exist- and to hell with guilt, regret, courtship, etc.

But what do we do? Forgo empathy? Forgo compulsion? Forgo love? Forgo individuality? I don't want to live in a world like that. But do I?

It's interesting to me that meditation (and it's varying forms) seem to help reconcile the anima/animus moreso than any other methods humanity has tried (war, religion, torture, puritanism, psychology). You would think at this point the practice would be so widespread.

Personally I feel like human beings are monsters- as you said, maybe some kind of crossbreed between angels/aliens and animals. I don't think we have any idea how positively terrifying and magical we are.

It reminds me of another poem (of course):

"Report on Human Beings"
by Michael Goldman

You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have our ruins and records,
but they won't tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our interest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using or breaking them--
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here--
winds, dogs, the sun--
we could turn against you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a million species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
liked to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
like to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of animals,
the birds' repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, "I am bored."
A kind of clarity came
when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth into our lover's throat
and shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, feelers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
stranges of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind’s pure snowflake
was our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we called art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness,
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great palace we built
on the axis of time
out of our fear and cruelty called history,
only those who have lived in the anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, "I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,"
another, "It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time."
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
nor the dinosaur would do.

posted October 01, 2009 11:58 AM         

quote:

---

I think the problem is that the dichotomy is almost impossible to reconcile

---

Why do you need to reconcile it, aerial?
Why not just accept it for what it is and live it?

We are all weak. We are human. And that's beautiful.

quote:

---

You look at an animal and you see that animal has absolutely no conflicting feelings about it's life purpose.

---

I believe that intuitively people have no conflicting feelings about their life purpose either. It appears that for some people though this "intuitive place of peace" is buried too deep inside and it takes a lot of determination and time to reach it.

quote:

---

You don't have to wonder anymore whether you're "doing what you're meant to do." You're just doing to do, you just exist- and to hell with guilt, regret, courtship, etc.

But what do we do? Forgo empathy? Forgo compulsion? Forgo love? Forgo individuality? I don't want to live in a world like that. But do I?

---

posted October 01, 2009 12:37 PM         

quote:

---

Why do you need to reconcile it, aerial?

---

Oh, I don't necessarily feel *I* need to, personally. I was speaking of the collective "we," humanity in general, which has made a mess of itself over thousands of years trying in vain to reconcile their animal. I'm pretty comfortable with my Wolf Girl, warts and all, even if she tends to be fairly reactive. The battle we fight is that she forgets a lot that the "civilized world is a zoo, not a jungle!"

quote:

---

I believe that intuitively people have no conflicting feelings about their life purpose either. It appears that for some people though this "intuitive place of peace" is buried too deep inside and it takes a lot of determination and time to reach it.

---

posted October 01, 2009 12:42 PM         

quote:

---

I'm pretty comfortable with my Wolf Girl, warts and all, even if she tends to be fairly reactive.

---

So you mean, you don't count to ten before you speak? I expect nothing less from an Aries with a Gemini Rising!

posted October 01, 2009 01:04 PM         

*ANGERRRRR*

okay, this isn't working! Maybe we could just make a long list of incredibly intelligent people who agree with us instead?

posted October 01, 2009 07:32 PM         

I think we have to learn to love our weaknesses, forgive them, learn from them. It is by our mistakes we gain wisdom. So we need to make mistakes. So there's no point in torturing ourselves for our transgressions. But to learn.

posted October 02, 2009 10:33 AM         

quote:

---

Don't we wilt away, trying to be flowers?

---

Sometimes. And yet, it's necessary.