January 2023

Poetry as Sexual Revenge
by Mick Spillane

Sometimes you just get caught in the 
moment,
she's not particularly attractive
but she is kinda cute and she's making 
those sad  eyes,
and you are hurting and living
inside what Berryman called The 
Epistemology of Loss,
and you can feel the pheromones 
clinging
inside your cock like bats in a cave,
everything's upside down to start with,
and you figure
What the fuck.

So all of a sudden, maybe trying
to write about what you did last night,
maybe as a way to wash the taste out 
of your head,
what you said and did not say at 4:00 
AM,
you find the poem taking off on you,
it is toying with your mind the way
you toyed with her affections,
it insists on rhyming, or it demands
the satisfaction of meter,
and it wraps its feet around you

and won't let go