Connie Scozzaro

Bidet Meridian

 

Graven parsimony, altitude climbs on the beckoning breasts
of the figurine I don’t sleep with; she moves up then down
in breath, she is two sails fledged full with air;
but we must be sensible about this, must take care
less for me than for you, puppy, teat, billowing tower
on the brink of all I can eat. So you are a warrior,
reckoner, with sandcastle cheeks and an expensive afterglow,
I dog, avail ten horizons a second, chew dumbly
at the stupid collar, the resplendent ass.

In my dreams bathrooms come,

one by one, two then some,
baths cut into the ground, graves for beautiful alcoholic men
in their early to mid twenties. Be seated on this tiny toilet:
this futurist doll is for you to rock hard, not shake, not rattle,
a basin to bring to the beaming lips
and drink; red, chevron, overlap. You must not kill.
Besides, the psychosis you speak of
is just the perspective, where cubism lent its
eyes to the wrong side.

Have you ever wobbled along a line, a mid-point, let’s call it the

meridian, gently slender and unkind? I have lost
my footing there one time before, I lose it again now,
fall into the arms of mothers who lay me in a
cradle with lions made of glass. Lavender,
I drink you, porcelain buttons, I push you.
Eyeballs drop, roll across the floor,
two dice, two sixes: go again, porcelain.
Ice thrills against the thigh, I have never felt this
ashamed; the ass, “calmly and patiently fucked”, looks back
with some delicate and frenzied unease.
Sleeping, long ago, in a gown pulled up to my neck
I sing to you about Wisconsin and fidelity.

OK, so your bedroom looks like P.G. Wodehouse and mine looks like

Francis Bacon, and not the philosopher. In my bedroom, I trap the gorillas
I love in cages of paint, to watch them burst out again
and again, clapping my hands. You, in your room, fuck
humans, in miniature, in good faith, on a sweet china set you got
from Morocco. How about a sex that breaks your face?
A more radical agony? A better farce, please:
murder parlour games of foreplay and don’t let go,
Spanish Tragedy all night with two (or more) players
till everybody comes.

“Hippy shit”, I think, when talking to the cool & famous

American poetess. She has agreed to flush with me; today we chose water
not icy but burning, and I think Petrarch as the temperature
soars. What about a radical critique from the post-
Freudian feminist Marxist book-reading left about the dumb
body of 1968 and its Epicurean tastes for dismal imaginative fields?
Risking an ogreish stance on my comrades, yonis, I must explain:
I tried to unschool my body, to declass it, withdraw the slaps
of rulers on bent knuckles. Tried to untwist and untangle from
anguished theoretical stalemates, tried to take my pussy
on a weekend away to thoroughly relax and unwind her. I fed
her mojitos on a white beach, told her she was beautiful and applied
too much pressure to herself. In the end I stopped talking
to her at all because I wanted her to unlearn her name and unlearn
the grammar which tells her she is a pussy and is not a pugilist,
a police, or a positivism, not a pinot grigot, peccadillo, or poo-na-nay.

The American poetess has long left this conversation,

righteously distracted by a peripheral object showing its
transience, and thus, excellence. In the Italian marble bathroom
I spread out my arms and legs, feel the cold on my face,
wait for some happy sting: I hurt, therefore
you are; waves break against the glimmering interface, roses billow
into metaphysics. Who are you, and how do you
love me, outside on a bright day, each seeing the other with
new and fashionable eyes, a pair of rioting hearts.

In Public

Populist art succoured to the poplar tree

politics is not a personality, authoritarian, unfree,
it is two scissor blades making love, it is humility
glowing in a ruby between the open legs of an acrobat.
Pick yourself out of the graven margin, bring
starved lips to the tender orange, kiss in public,
mercury rises against the leotard worn by
the tiny girl in first position.
 
Bury the face in absorbent porcelain. A dancer
desires you and the way you tap your feet,
you arch to receive him on a tightrope of recalcitrant
white. My amber shadow oozes around you
in public, where hands have learnt discipline, not to
fondle collars or small mouths, but to snap
into dark fists, hard stones. To be out-mastered
in suffering, to be
Jane Eyre.

Half-life of houseguests, I am uranium to lead all night

in the bedroom, the bathtub, the chill afterglow of lamplight.
Cold fireplace gives a hollow laugh, I may not
sing, I may not drink from the saucer of salted milk. Gravity
is an object, it may be cast out of the pram or squat, it may be
overlooked. This is a four-sided shape: there’s her, she,
you and you; mobile love is a winged stone teased into a dirty clasp.
The skin of you twinkles: for what of terror,
for what of the portrait with the moving eyes, for what of the
shame we learn by.

Communicate across a crowded room with the sign of a rhombus

made with the thumb and forefinger, make a gobo
with your love and send me a galaxy prickled with stars.
I will know what you mean, for the heart is a beacon,
and fish swim towards the light,
logical, hungry.

Stupid bunny drives romantic disaster

Bunny ponders on some numbers,

meditates on a sweltering affect.
She is dazzled by Christmas lights, grammar,
fondles the food on her plate, strokes the tie of a
man who is new. He makes his fish curry, it is not for her,
they have never met comfortably before.

She cannot drive, especially not to a romantic place;
Feeling the grit on her face, thinking about poetry,
she salutes a G.I. running hard on a rolling
barrel of gas; he is green and pop-eyed,
digs his bayonette into the innocent air. This is her holiday,
she is not close and not far;
rueful, she feels sometimes safe.

She will eat, at his cost, the food she likes best. That food
is pearls and the boiled fur of expensive Siamese cats; she will
have milk from the eyes of a whale, will eat emeralds off a
fan made of bone. She will, at some cost, be a queer carrot
fucked in a child’s fist, be a heterosexual root vegetable
doing a queer thing. At her own cost, blithely,
she will be demure, a heroine, masturbate perhaps
at scenes of most abject sexual violence,
lick orgasms off the floor, flee sulking into
the articulate sea.

Must everyone elope as maniacs? All
the planes in the sky become swans with wide
spans and heavy hearts, and they are all headlong
towards a stupid country. Come, bird, to the
eternity lights, where beautiful women eat
cherries off avant-garde pianos and kiss. Fantasy
has become my most loquacious
companion, has gabbled for me
a loving paradise of infinite detail and possibility,
tells me love is not a democracy but that it might be
a balm. I am a maniac and I have the balm,
will fuck her always as my sister, petit objet,
Karina, the noiseless, ornate.