I wanted to call this post “My favorite horny poems” but I thought that would get flagged by the spam filters. That’s the real title, though, and it’s what this week is all about: poems that made me blush, poems that radiate lust, poems that made me go lol WOW. It’s hilarious to think of writing a poem with such strong and undeniable goon energy it ends up in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Like, can you imagine? Incredible stuff.
It’s not all lust though. I pulled some that are less…carnal…and more tender, where sex and desire are present, but more in the service of loving intimacy or as a reminder of our younger selves. Desire changes as we age, it changes the longer we’re in a relationship, but it doesn’t disappear, and we never really forget what it was like to be so at the mercy of our hormones. Sometimes all it takes is a touch or a glance or a change to our well-worn routines to bring us right back there.
(As a side note, it was fun to think about this debate around whether it’s better to desire or to be desired. I think, correctly, that it’s better to desire.)
Ok on to the poems, arranged loosely on a spectrum of mildly to outrageously horny:
Untitled, Hafiz
Nothing wrong with wanting to get a little tipsy and make out with your wife on the floor. We love a wife guy.
All I want to do
is get drunk with my wifeAn endless glass of wine
both of us on the floorSo what if squares
look down on us?Boring and misguided
are their miserable livesWhen my wife is in the city
and I’m home
I want to cryThe moonlight
on the cypress tree
is a bitter lightNo book has ever kissed me
like she does
Today I love Being Alive, Alex Dimitrov
That second stanza. I feel a honeymoon stage contact high from that alone.
I wake up and eat a banana.
Stand naked in my kitchen.
Shave and listen to Billie Holiday.My god, I’m so obsessed with you.
You’re new. You’re tall. You make me feel
like never putting clothes on.
Who’s to say if you’ll still be around
when anyone’s reading this poem.
Or if the Earth will continue(it’s getting very hot!)
or if we’ll get it right in language
exactly how we feel about each other.
I don’t care about being remembered.
I care about a great glass of wine.
Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather.Call me old-fashioned, really.
But when I cut myself shaving above the lip,
I lick up the blood. I don’t wince.
The Dessert I Didn’t Have, Brenda Shaughnessy
I don’t think this is really about sex — or rather, being haunted by the ghost of mind-blowing sex never had — but I’m choosing to read it that way.
Grilled peaches on shortbread with raspberries and black pepper ice cream.
We’re all out, said the communicative waiter.
That was twelve years ago.
Kissing, Fleur Adcock
“Young people think they invented sex” as a poem.
The young are walking on the riverbank
arms around each other’s waist and shoulders,
pretending to be looking at the waterlilies
and what might be a nest of some kind, over
there, which two who are clamped together
mouth to mouth have forgotten about.
The others, making courteous detours
around them, talk, stop talking, kiss.
They can see no one older than themselves.
It’s their river. They’ve got all day.Seeing’s not everything. At this very
moment the middle-aged are kissing
in the backs of taxis, on the way
to airports and stations. Their mouths and tongues
are soft and powerful and as moist as ever.
Their hands are not inside each other’s clothes
(because of the driver) but locked so tightly
together that it hurts: it may leave marks
on their not of course youthful skin, which they won’t
notice. They too may have futures.
Love: Beginnings, C.K. Williams
When someone else’s chemistry is so strong it awakens your own latent desire.
They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much
frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity
and unity they make —
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter
at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of
being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in
flame into the sexual —
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that fill-
ing of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again,
stamping in its stall.
I Knew a Woman, Theodore Roethke
Hot for teacher.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
Wish for a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke
Roethke makes the list twice bc calling someone “my lively writher” is obscene lol.
My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.
Warming Her Pearls, Carol Ann Duffy
“oooh oooh oooh, I’m on fire” – Bruce Springsteen Carol Ann Duffy
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head.... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the wayshe always does.... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
Bitch, Carolyn Kizer
I laughed out loud reading this the first time.
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
He isn’t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
“Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It’s just that she remembers how she came running
Each evening, when she heard his step;
How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
Though he was absorbed in his paper;
Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen
Until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
When he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
Come back to her now, seem more important
Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
“It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say.
He couldn’t have taken you with him;
You were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
“Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag
As I drag you off by the scruff,
Saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.”
My Belovèd Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout, Paul Durcan
“I will deposit my scum” FILTHY!!!
When in the heat of the first night of summer
I observe with a whistle of envy
That Jackson has driven out the road for a pint of stout,
She puts her arm around my waist and scolds me:
Am I not your pint of stout? Drink me.
There is nothing except, of course, self-pity
To stop you having your pint of stout.
Putting self-pity on a leash in the back of the car,
I drive out the road, do a U-turn,
Drive in the hall door, up the spiral staircase,
Into her bedroom. I park at the food of her bed,
Nonchalantly step out leaving the car unlocked,
Stroll over to the chest of drawers, lean on it,
Circumspectly inspect the backs of my hands,
Modestly request from her a pint of stout.
She turns her back, undresses, pours herself into bed,
Adjusts the pillows, slaps her hand on the coverlet:
Here I am - at the very least
Look at my new cotton nightdress before you shred it
And do not complain that I have not got a head on me.
I look around to see her foaming out of the bedclothes
Not laughing but gazing at me out of four-legged eyes.
She says: Close your eyes, put your hands around me.
I am the blackest, coldest pint you will ever drink
So sip me slowly, let me linger on your lips,
Ooze through your teeth, dawdle down your throat,
Before swooping down your guts.
When you drink me I will deposit my scum
On your rim and when you get to the bottom of me,
No matter how hard you try to drink my dregs -
And being a man, you will, no harm in that -
I will keep bubbling up back at you.
For there is no escaping my aftermath.
Tonight being the first night of summer -
You may drink as many pints of me as you like.
There are barrels of me in the tap room.
In thin daylight at nightfall,
You will fall asleep drunk on love.
When you wake early in the early morning,
All chaste, astringent, aflame with affirmation,
Straining at the bit to get to First Mass
And Holy Communion and work - the good life.
[may i feel said he], e. e. Cummings
I’m mixed on him but he was undeniably horny. There are probably better examples (“cccome”, though…) but this was the one I had at hand as I paged through some anthologies this week.
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
may i stay said he
which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she
but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)
The Cinnamon Peeler, Michael Ondaatje
My GOD. Hide your wife, Mr. Cinnamon Peeler.
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers . . .When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and saidthis is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfumeand knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.
That’s all I got. You can’t really ask for more after “The Cinnamon Peeler”. But if your favorite wasn’t on the list, PLEASE let me know what it is in the comments.
Song on repeat
I started a playlist for these. I’ll make sure to update weekly!
This is less about the song and more about the video. This is the first video I remember watching on MTV and going, oh I think I’m too young for this.
I’m breaking form with a second song this week. I was torn between these two. The “Wicked Games” video is simply too steamy to ignore for this theme, but whenever I even think about “I’m on Fire” I end up listening to it on repeat for a full day.