A Secret
by Sina Queyras
Eliot was right; it’s useless to describe a feeling. -Elizabeth Bachinsky
The students won’t bow, or pirouette,
Though they trace the stations
Of your exit, like Alice, diving into the
Wreck. They love all the plunges,
All the feels. The layers. The rage,
The ravage. The pills. The outfits.
The wit. The sex. The smoulder.
The double-barrelled insults, the eye-rhymes,
The wit, the sullen,
The anger:
The smart ones stab that and ride it,
One middle finger
Up their cunts, the other
Erect in your face. The adoring ones
Sharpen your barbs, they would
Draw blood on your behalf,
Strap Ariel on their back,
Leap off tall buildings.
Too bad you weren’t a man, or
A woman who fucked like one
The worse you behaved,
The louder the critics rave:
Unstoppable, they’d say!
So much herself! Sure she slaps
A man now and then, begs them
Cook her meals and listen intently
To all her aspirations, but she’s a genius,
And we all know how “difficult” that is.
Bend over, you’d command,
I’ll give you a critique right up the ass,
And they would wiggle and squawk,
Brushing the soft tips of their needy
Cocks against your hips. Your verse
They would align with your virility.
No need for Valium, no anti-psychotics,
Just pints: pour and joust. Lithe
Young men would cheer you as you trampled
Through gorse riding William Logan
Bareback into the classroom, a smart
Whip on his ass. Take everything!
You’d shout. Strip the canon, let the walls
Fall, let men heap fruit on plates,
And mind your children while you write.
You wouldn’t age, you would simply
Date ever younger men—wait,
And women and androgynes—
No need to be discerning just hit refresh
And another appears. One who
Will massage your feet, another to type your
Poems, fend off critics on your behalf
As you lay back and dream of Yeats:
For God’s sake, hold your cock and let her
Write, Yeats would yell, on his knees
Between your legs. It doesn’t often befall
A man to service a genius! Does that
Disturb? Sweet you. Naïve you with your
Desire for good. Just last week I sat
In a room full of suits who laughed at all
The old lines. Aging men with young wives
For canes, reading their verse libre, their Lares,
Their Penates. Where, the young men wondered,
Ties alert as fox ears, where could they sign up
To be the new Ted Hughes? Sylvia, why
Not wipe your lips on their promise?
You who, after all, already accompany
The young into their bluest hours.
The lucent cock banging at my door
Was never more polite. Eating youth
Is the poet’s birth rite.
About the Author:
Sina Queyras is the author of MxT & several other books published with Coach House.
