The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 95. Seven Poems by Walt Curtis

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Seven Poems by Walt Curtis

 

 

Levi’s

 

Because your ass looks good in levis,

always wear them.

they shrink to fit.

When I unbutton bright metal buttons,

my flustered fingers, pubic curls,

and the curve of your ass shows.

Slapping down hands, smooth on fingers,

the contrast – blue cloth

against white bare thighs – kills me.

Blue jeans and pecker tracks.

The hot rivets, next to the campfire,

burns dots in the skin

sometimes against my penis. Jump back!

A teenager, one of the first times spunk

I will remember always

on my faded levis milky white fluid.

Soft clouds in a blue summer sky.

 

 

 

Shaman Ritual at Sunburst Canyon

 

Shaman Michael drumming

at the river. The most beautiful sight

in all creation. Handsome

long-haired youth standing proud

stark naked before Mother Earth.

Drumming up his dreams. Otherworldly,

contact on the ribbed rock, inside

the whorl of the Sunburst on the

Molalla. His spirit place, he said.

Pool mirrored the ribbed rock and

whorl of magma. In class, a woman

shaman took him on a journey to

the underworld entrance. He rode

a horse, but still didn’t find his

animal helper. But his place of

power was here. His guide to the site

me. Both having swam naked here

in the past, smoked pot, sunbathed.

My glorious Michael in the pride

of young manhood. We hallucinated

on the clabbered clouds, flying high

above the firs. He asked me,

“Can we camp overnight here sometime?”

“Sure,” I replied. My heart beating

faster than the drum. How could

the cosmos give me such a lovely

friend? Soul son. May I be worthy

of his trust and love, O Goddess.

O World Mother, protect us both,

nurture our friendship. Please I beg.

I promise to be worthy even unto death.

We laughed, we were stunned when the

horse-hide drum suddenly lost its timbre.

How? Why? Michael’s long wet hair

moistened the shaman’s music into silence.

O Goddess, your powers and energies

are everywhere.

 

 

 

Raul

 

Raul, gentle boy of Mexico,

I miss you, seashells on

your wrist, mule teeth on a string

around your neck. Sun-bleached, blondish

boy, you came north to seek

something, someone, maybe me,

maybe your own adventurous self.

 

I loved your slender body,

tender growing beauty, wrestling

playfully on the mattress on the floor,

smoking dope. Pinkish t-shirt. Liquid eyes

gently and psychicly stoned.

 

“Que ondas?” You asked me,

“What are the waves? How are the vibes?”

I loved you like a lover –

and when that didn’t work out –

like a son. A young friend.

 

You stored your belongings in my room,

in my car. I nearly cried

when you knocked on my window

in the middle of the night

after a long stowawayed freight-

train ride from Chicago.

 

A mistake. Your face freckled

and speckled by poisonous chemicals

from the freezing boxcar. Ragged clothes

greasy and eaten by acid.

You had got on the wrong trip north.

I made you shower, held you

in my arms in the bed, and then cooked breakfast.

What a hungry youth, with

a sense of humor, slow, laconic

body, walking ingenuously

along the dirty street.

 

Coming to check me out

and bum some grass – you

loved to smoke that home-grown dope –

we spar, and joke, and play around.

 

You are one of the loveliest humans

I have met in my life.

As I write this, I want you near me.

It was so easy and affectionate then. Now

there is a sadness and aching emptiness

which fills my body. You are back in Mexico, I guess,

and I miss you often and think of you often,

and there is no way to touch you.

 

Raul, will you return?

My long, lanky boy with sun-bleached hair

and an air of delicacy about you.

 

After you left, in February, a letter

came from Tijuana. From your sister, Rosa.

She sounded worried and longed to see you.

Here are the last three lines in blue ink:

 

“Se despide tu hermana que desea verte

y todo alla en la casa desea verte.

Contestame pronto Saludos.”

“Your sister takes leave of you and desires

to see you and all here at home want to see you.

Answer me right away.”

 

 

 

The Soft Rain

 

Something is sensuous about the soft rain,

and sad.

Like a string of – not pearls –

but hot tears

plucked from the ocean depths,

pried from the oysters of your eyes.

I, the poor lover, made you cry.

Everytime it rains like this,

I realize that.

I am the deep-sea diver

who opened your eyes,

a flood of salty vision.

Those signals of your SOS,

such jeweled distress,

do not reach me

at forty fathoms deep.

No.

Only the soft drops of rain on my face

when I rise to the surface

allow me to recall the look, the place,

a lover’s disgrace.

Seeded by flakes of grit,

your body remains

on the bottom of life’s ocean.

Not Murine, no lotion soothes the ache.

Touching my face, the soft rain

is like the sobbing of a seashell

pressed to my ear and dripping hair.

 

 

 

Crab Man Loves You

 

Crab man loves you,

crab man thrives upon you.

He claws his way across

the ocean floor, looking for

the soft parts of your belly,

your guts and thighs and butt

and soft wiggly plushy toes

always moving in a toe-dance, in a toe-jam

of rapacious delight.

To the changes of the moon

his movements become more erratic,

hard-shelled, scrabbly

like the soft clatter of cat nails on the kitchen floor.

 

When he finds you, you like a mermaid,

with your breasts exposed

leaning back against a reef of sharp coral

exhausted and panting, in passionate fear,

he will change into a gentle octopus,

or giant golden sea urchin,

again transforming into the handsomest

underwater prince, Greek boy,

sensually muscled Neptune, Davy Jones,

Hawaiian beach boy surfer type, strumming a soft ukulele,

your eyes have ever spied upon.

 

He will tenderly take you in his smoky-tanned arms,

rocking you to the romantic lullaby of the deep,

music of the deep, green, green,

and your terror will become

the most intense throbbing love,

like the changes of the moon,

like the awful suddenness of a tropic typhoon.

Crab man loves you. Crab man thrives upon you

at the bottom of the ocean.

 

 

 

My Greek Friend

 

My Greek friend is like My Sin.

A kind of sexual perfume

exudes from behind his ears.

His fingers are slender

and sensitive to human vibration

like a preying mantis’s.

His hair black and blue and lightly oiled

like a gun barrel,

and all the brightness and browness of a sea

sparkles in the twinkling of an eye.

 

When he explodes in laughter,

he is like a horse coughing.

He is like a stallion darkly prancing,

a gentle colt, sturdy and steady as a Cyprian donkey.

Philos mu. Mandrahalo. Malaka.

 

If he would only say, Kiss me,

and kiss me

or playfully slap my face

with his touchy quick and delicate fingers;

I would write a poem about our friendship,

about peasants and pistachio,

about Castoria and carnivals of love.

Ouzo, heavy and sweetly sullen as licorice.

About the self, like a city of white-washed houses

with terraces and fragrant transparent air,

surrounded by the wilderness mountains of Macedonia.

 

If you read and understand Kazantzakis,

perhaps you have a soul.

Perhaps you are a genius or a genii.

Whose inner fires burn hot and white

as the low and pulsating bonfires of stars

above your mountain village.

Spilling out all the miraculous brilliance

of eleutheria e thanatos,

eros or nero.

 

I am malaka. I am Sokrates sucking cock,

and all the brightness and browness of the sea

sparkles in the twinkling of his eye.

 

 

 

Lost Glasses

 

I dream of my lost glasses

flying across the continent,

streaming above the North Pole.

A Mongolian picks them up in the snow

and finds his way out if a blinding blizzard.

 

On a desert island,

they are found amidst seashells

sparkling supine to the mermaid

who never herself allows to be seen,

but now she appears and smilingly nakedly.

 

Africa; a person, for the first time,

counts numbers melodically, methodically

marking on a blackboard, with my glasses on.

 

Children will find them

sometime in the faraway future

and will see what I saw with my eyes

and feel what I felt, life-is-good looks,

with my heart. Life is good books.

 

And my heart in the grave

will get a new pair and put them on,

looking just like a turnip with spectacles

palpitating.

 

Whole new visions for the world and the world’s humans

because I have lost my sight,

my four eyes, my eyes with wings.

 

 

 

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