| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett) KINKY CALYPSO Mitchell Geller (EDowson) GRAN T. Obatala (trkyounger)piano nobile (Italian: “noble floor”) –
Cinch your belt and straighten up, then tilt into a contraposto stance
in architecture, main floor of a Renaissance building
and practice pausing: glance ahead as if you were a dancer
halting, poised, attending to the barest breath of cue you know
will soon require you to lilt onstage: perfect the ways you wait
in public: following a rubric of propriety and politesse, address
the empty air as if it were a scrutinizing sea of cultivated eyes intent
on sizing up your next and every move: remove all doubt, brush every
unseen awkward worry out and off your sleek and gleaming skin:
the piano nobile is lit, the string quartet begins, your moment to arrive
is nigh. Or so I dreamed last night imagining what I’d feel like when I die.
People tink kinky is sumpin’ new.
People tink kinky is hip and trendy.
Kinky been round for ages – it’s true! –
since Peter Pan got stuck on Wendy.
Kinky been round since Oedipus
done had de hots for Miz Jocasta
and made a great unholy fuss
dat caused his vision much disasta.
When you young dey’s stuff occurs
dat make yo private parts distend.
Autre temps and autre moeurs,
still dat kinky never end.
Some like boots on dominatrix,
some like bodies hot and stinky.
Human heads and hormones play tricks –
lots of dem result in kinky.
I am a floater.
I am the one
Whose love
Overcomes you.
Even when my grandmother
Snatched me by the hair roots
At the age of nine for “lookin’
So much like my father”
And dragged me to the coop
To watch the rats eat the half
Bodies of dead chickens,
I floated. Daylight, fear,
Pain, I was always mindful
Of what I was using up because
Finally the personal became the only
Thing that mattered.
“I’m doing this for your mother,
You little bastard,” she screamed.
Even then, what seemed so deep,
So mean, became naive.
For wasn’t she Gran,
My Gran, the parent whose
Jesus granite stone marked
The threshold of forgetting?
And when I cried she beat me
And beat me until I lost count,
Until I learned to float, everything
Blurred turning white, past the dust
On feet, past the food on the prisoners
Plates, the working hinge,
Even past you.
MORE ABOUT THE IBPC...
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Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2003
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2002
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2001
