A Song for Baby
While I work on the edits for “a place you cant come back from” I thought I’d give you another Bowling Alley poem. In my opinion this one, “First Date” and “Sullen, but not quite repentant” are the quintessential “radio hits.” They represent, more than anything else I was writing at the time, the attitude and demeanor I held during this time period. It’s risque but somehow dry, with that ever present youthful anger. Enjoy…
A Song For Baby
Your Pedantic search for truth
through unsuspecting lives,
leaves girls wondering
faith and cosmopolitan sexuality;
leaves men pondering God,
in tumultuous copulation.
The vulturous squalor
of your predatory eyes,
the death you feel in age;
the uncouth joy you find in
Desire.
I see the innocence,
the pure unkempt
Youthfulness
in your smile.
The only vestige of
the life you desire.
You perspire and
extrapolate the need and desire of
men and boys.
The purpose your life has
derived.
With grasping limbs
and intertwining extremities
the pulse of distinctive,
and purely diabolic,
hearts pound in unison.
The power and force of
your vapid conjointedness
juxtaposes reality.
You ask for Faith
You ask for Belief
You ask for Hope
Why don’t you realize
these are pronouncements
only for the Holy?
What you really crave
what you really hunger for
is Desire.
That lust in a young man’s eye
The postulation behind the
Powerful.
That un-touched
That un-satiated
That un-natural
Desire!
The type which doesn’t exist!
What you love is lust,
but what lust could love?
When is a lecher good?
When is lasciviousness absolute?
With your talk of luxurious tapetries
and proportions of men…
Wallet or otherwise.
The vivaciousness of women
competent or otherwise,
of your overwhelming
denigrating Power.
Your false Hubris
Do you know?
How weak?
Disheveled?
Degraded?
How useless it is?
Your
Desire?
She was Perfumed with Cigarettes and Beer
These are both from the Bowling Alley period. I find when reading back through them there is an underpinning of angst, fear, loneliness and anger, but there is an underpinning of hope strewn throughout, weaved into a tangled skein of confusion. There were a few “desire” poems from that period and I submit one for your approval.
She was Perfumed with Cigarettes and Beer
She stomped her feet
in defiance.
A gesture only known to youth.
To encapsulate beauty
with he word “cute”
Would be presumptuous;
superfluous really.
A life of desire
only known through gestures
of copulation for redemption.
Speaking of love
in the throes of ecstasy.
The drug of choice.
A modicum of desire
is all that’s required.
Alcohol, the catalyst
of wanton cruelties,
ruling consciousness,
the pain of friendship
and the flurry of seduction.
The moniker “cheater”
so deferential as to
abandon hope.
A life separated from a
promise of dreams
a promise of touch
a promise of love.
So valued as to capitulate
the necessity of abandonment.
Where is home?
Where is love?
So abstract a concept,
only to be requited by the foolish.
Unrequited,
the only vestige for the depressed.
She downs the wine with
one singular swallow.
Devaluing the past
with a hope of the future.
A desperate cry of my name.
To bring resolution to pain.
To bring absolute restitution
to choices so wrongly executed.
But how to absolve?
How does one abandon
that driving force to mend others?
How does one ignore hope?
ignore love?
ignore life?
to adhere to pretensions held by priests?
Who am I to absolve
the pain of others when
I cant evolve through
the pain I derive?
Love contracts hope
but desire trumps all.
Matters of the heart are forgotten
for individual moments
of ecstasy.
So she stands and pounds her feet
with the beat of my heart
and I smile
hug
console
then abandon her to problems
as I embrace my own.
Sean McBride 