Living the erotic life

Reading a poem is an act of erotic involvement. You are tasting, eating and digesting the flesh of the fruit of the poem. You are absorbed in the juices running down your face. You sense the heaviness of the peach-plum-nectarine poem in your hands and the tenderness of the flesh as it yields to your teeth, tongue and lips. Reading a poem is like making love to a man - intensely enjoyable, arousing and fulfilling.

Making a poem is also an act of erotic involvement. You have a line that arrows into you and you are lifted out of the mundane world you exist in most of the time and you pull the arrow out of your heart (or where ever else it lands) and examine the damage. Are you mortally wounded? If so, how can you describe the arrow's circumference of injury? What are your after effects? Will you survive? If you will, how will you do this?

Because making poems is so intensely arousing, this arousal spills over to regular life. Even when I'm not in poem making mode, I'm more sensuous and awake to the pleasures of the flesh, the senses, the emotions and the mind. I'm awake to the delicate, small, winged seeds on every living thing that helicopter their way to the ground to my feet. If I go for a walk, I can see the row of plastic red Santas with their anonymous smiles as some sort of yearly welcome into a season or the efforts of some woman behind the facade of a concrete house to show that she is still a child at heart. I can see the wreaths, the red ribbons, the star dusted Styrofoam snow flakes as similar expressions of the child in each of us and be seduced by the loveliness of human beings. I can enter the forest and see the dried up piles of leaves rustling in their long graves and wonder at the bodies that they hide. There are simple red wreaths of berries on the trees here and I touch them to feel their frozen goodness. I am not afraid to touch, and hold and feel the parts of trees and bushes and plants. They are good to touch.

If you are poet, you will have an immense hunger for such scenes and such touchings. You will want to go out each day and soak yourself in the liquid sunlight, in the skinniness of the starving white birch tree limbs, in the horrid shadows of each collapsed fir and you will want to slide like a snake into these shadows and make for yourself a small lean to and hide out there while the winter winds blow. You will want the touch of those winds in your hair, the slide of the snow on your naked flesh and then, the melting of the white as the pallid sun penetrates the heads of the poplars to reach you with it's warming arms. You will want all of these things because you are in the erotic stream of life and of words and you cannot swim out of it.

A poet is always swimming in the erotic stream of life and words. It is a dense way to live because sometimes you need a time out as I took one today. I simply did nothing. I shut off the words. I slept. I wrote desultory complaints. I fussed. But out of that day of drudgery (as I call my non-poetry days) came this sense of the goodness of my real life (my poetry life). I cannot imagine how I could live without the textures, the colors and the deep breathing in of the images of my life. I cannot imagine how sparse it would be if I couldn't put them out as remade life in my poems. Life can be reconfigured erotically and lived deeply - if you want to or if you can enter into this type of life. Wanting is a great start to this particular journey.