APRÈS BAUDELAIRE

nous rions sans cesse ne pas avoir besoin
de comprendre un mot l’autre dit.
il n’y a rien à dire, il n’y a rien à signaler.
nous sommes sûrs comme sa salive remplit ma bouche.
Je bois de chacun de ses fontaines.
au goût de ses larmes, c’est d’aimer une femme
plus que toute femme a jamais aimé
et si je lui dis, elle va dire que je suis fou
parce que je l’ai connu pendant une seconde.

nous allons embrasser jusquà ce que nos larmes sont partis,
toutes nos craintes apaisées et réparées,
toutes nos blessures supprimés de la mémoire
et si elle me demande d’y aller, je vais laisser tranquillement
et reconnaissant pour le goût de ses larmes
sachant ma mémoire ne peut jamais renoncer
la symétrie de son visage et l’amour
dont le sang et les rêves sont composés.

et encore, sa présence me submerger,
remplir mes salles, ma vie et mes visions
à l’absinthe, la débauche et pur amour
car elle est la physicalité sublime de la rêverie,
le secret de l’Univers. elle est cette femme.

elle regarde avec envie dans les yeux, en état d’ébriété,
franche et belle et chuchotements, « merde »
parce qu’elle m’aime et qui est son honnêteté.
Je suis un poète dépouillé de la métaphore et de la raison.
elle m’apprend que notre amour se développe dans le silence,
que notre passion est contrainte, pas l’obsession et
que l’hiver et les rêves peuvent jamais froid.
J’avale le baiser humide de ses lèvres boudeuses de tabac.

AFTER BAUDELAIRE

we laugh endlessly not understanding,
nor needing to, a word each other says.
there is nothing to talk about, nothing to say.
we are safe now as her saliva fills my mouth.
I drink from all of her fountains.
to taste her tears is to love a woman
more than any woman was ever loved
and if I tell her, she will say I am mad
because I have known her for one second.

we will embrace until our tears are gone,
all our fears abated and mended,
all our wounds removed from memory
and if she asks me to go, I will leave quietly
and grateful for the taste of her tears
knowing my memory can never relinquish
the symmetry of her visage and the love
of which her blood and dreams are composed.

and still, her presence will overwhelm me,
filling my rooms, my life and my visions
with absinthe, debauchery and purest love
for she is the sublime physicality of reverie,
the secret of the Universe. she is this woman.

she gazes longingly into my eyes, intoxicated,
candid and beautiful and whispers, “merde”
because she loves me and that is her honesty.
I am a poet stripped of metaphor and reason.
she teaches me that our love thrives in silence,
that our passion is compulsion, not obsession and
that winter and dreams can never be cold again.
I gulp the moist kiss of her pouting tobacco lips.

© James Sapsard 2014

I WATCH OUR BACKS

the screech of her relentlessly
honed, chrome polished thighs
ignited our anti post-apocalyptic,
sizzling bedroom bonfire vanities.

a monumental discourse illuminated
our medieval mental manuscripts
as her meandering indulgence
flowed into my neck of the would have.

modern rocker vespers blitzed our
Saturday night shiv and live while the
domestic promise of the post-war
unwanted pregnancy product whose

name was probably not what it seemed
heralded a welfare state of dreams
that could not be broken before they
had been dishonestly vouchsafed.

the traumatised father of my last love
worked nights at the oil refinery.
she, an apprentice hairdresser, ditched
for the sake of her English ungrammar.

orange street lamps illuminated a snow
buried street of 1960’s falsified housing.
she meets me halfway and her mouth
has the taste of the last thing she licked.

she is my new girl and I am the teacher
of lost words yet merely a student of her
compulsory ceremonies of what she tells
me is the only acceptable proof of love.

and she takes me home with her where
we sit around the corner in that L shaped
living room and conquer new territories
while her mother crochets away the war.

© James Sapsard 2013

YET THERE IS MADNESS IN’T

I remember 1820 because I was there.
my last two teenage years and the last
year of my second decade.

whenever I chose to leave was okay
but I hated the feeling of rejection
when I was told to go/sent home.

so I must tell you, that even though
I love you beyond infinity,
I can’t go to the party tonight.

I’m thinking of a friend who died,
wealthy beyond extravagant dreams
and yet he came to me
because he respected my opinion

and of the girl in the blue mini
who lived up and down the road
and who picked me up
and showed me the sights
and shielded me
from her distastefully vulgar parents.

Marianne was in the hammock
waiting for the love that was avoiding her
and that girl who was on the album cover,
I wonder who and what happened to her.
re-issued in digital format for instant
download and aural gratification?

with the advent of media analogue,
we dissidents are no longer radioactive
but still green and glowing in the dark,
indifferent still to entrenched authority
and ignoring the inexplicable limitations
of precisely argued logical constraints.

© James Sapsard 2013

AN ENGLISH SCHOOLBOY IN ROME

she held him with as much love as a call girl’s
love for money and desire for safety could express;
with more love than he had ever known.

in the shadow of the Basilica, her mouth of
a thousand salivas both tainted and purified his
innocence.

the other side of a few walls away, befrocked priests
penalised their defrocked brethren through perverse
fear of castigation.

she spoke the multilingual English of economic necessity,
the recipient of his insecurity, borne over waters blue
into the pale, yearning flanks of her dual compulsion.

his reply heralded an arc of her tears as she was held,
for the first time, in the arms of a fallen, yet elevated
angel, to hear his sympatico blessing, “Io ti amo.”

© James Sapsard 2013

THE LAST WORD

we gave, to love, every sense our school masters
and their mistresses had denied us in their pastoral
country matters establishment, but which some
god’s mortally sinful field residents, in their
hide coats of many colours, had brazenly paraded
before us in their Elysian fields which lined our
slow, daily meander home, lost in saliva reverie.

speaking in bleating, lowing and whinnying
tongues, the grass grew greener beneath their sins.

in the later, orange, autumnal glow, my maiden,
fifteen, a year younger than I, revealed her
burning secret to her awed male companion,
as we pedalled our pink and blue, respectively,
bicycles around each other, circling endlessly,
or until teatime, carefully studying the apex
of each other’s taut, blue denim clad, thighs.

“when I sit on my bike and lean against the wall
and rock myself on the saddle, something happens.”

so we left both bikes against the wall, leaning
intimately into each other, saddles caressing,
as we ran into the nearest woods to become
each other’s saddle; and then on buses, in the
cinema and in the back seat of her father’s car
as he drove us home after seeking to impress us
with the new, local, American style supermarket.

unaware of the treats with which he was
accommodating us, he neither knew nor
understood the source of our conspiratorial
laughter every time he decelerated to drive
defiantly through the blissfully long, pot-holed
stretch of bumpy, disrepaired, private road,
running between the rich people’s houses.

we bumped and bounced, secret skin to secret skin,
to his bragadoccio that it made him feel good inside
and there was nothing anyone could do about it
and that was the best reason for doing anything.

then another time when I became empathetically
emotional, my eyes overflowing with honesty,
his decree that if I behaved like a baby, I deserved
to be treated like a baby, his turning to his wife,
her obedient agreement and my maiden’s secret
whisper in my ear that she was always a baby.

then his posturing diktat that in his house, we’d do
what our elders expected without question or dissent
and again, his wife’s quiet acquiescence of her power.

then the Friday he let me stay over after school,
his early morning departure, my sleeping in, my maiden’s
coveted first Saturday job and my gentle awakening
by her mother’s soft entry, her hand on my brow and her
whisper that the baby slept and she had too much milk.

my recollection that I deserved to be treated like a baby
and must do as expected without question or dissent

& that I declined an invitation to hypocrisy and betrayal.

© James Sapsard 2013

UNFIT FOR PURPOSE

the breadth of her words and mind
make me wish I were a woman
but what a disappointment
I would be.
the soft soles of my bare feet
could never commune as hers
with wet leaves and insect decay.
yet I would paint my visage
with spider web and evening.
we plummeted, as mankind,
from the moment we supplanted
sense with reality.
my regret is that I was insufficient
for any purpose enunciated by she.

© James Sapsard 2013