Two Poems

Verses

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Give me this orgasm its original form. Accidental sips. The vulva’s length is not a factor of the duration of the orgasm; it is flesh’s quiet. Come into my cunt / flood my separate chambers with a pipe organ’s timbre / and exit with a hand-loomed skin / swaddling your newborn cock. Wade through wet how peasants work rice fields—bent over, toiled. Germinate the paddies. My tits I will let you carve into hillside terraces; don’t forestall harvest. A fuck’s identity hinges on what it screws so yes, you, tighten my anatomy, clench my love.

Question Your Assumptions

[wpaudio url=”/audio/9_4/Liew2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Regret is not the word but when Tom Waits sings
I stopped taking dope / and I quit drinking whiskey
the temperature in my spine drops and
my back glows a luminescent red. This dim
existence is trichromatic & mantled. Ancient
Arab seafarers crossed oceans with compasses & astrolabes
for what? A good cup of Chinese tea and seasick
stories to tell their slit-eyed grandchildren? Here’s
something to consider: you are worthless. Quite
possibly your mother used to beat your father
but / hey we are not all strangers / and inheritance
is a weak excuse for your fingers’ familiarity
around my windpipes. My blood is unexceptional.
It won’t do. Find another sacrament for your penitence.
Because this cavity under my skin, because cavernous
inner lives have the life cycles of fruit flies. Want
to earn the right to trawl around these parts of town?
Ask the sea locusts. My personal gods crawl
on ocean floors. Killing is split-second / so fast / lights burst.
Even underwater death is swift. You could squeeze
the air out of my lungs but I am aegirine
black and I survive. I don’t need to inhale
what I cannot see
                           touch
                               or love—

God carved this neck out of stone; between cracked
crevices are not rivulets of desire. A metaphorical
heart can break but so too can it cannonball
you into orbit. Ah, all those warm nights I created / by /

               rubbing palms & roasting dirges
        over                       open                       fires.

                                                                  It is time you got off
                                                                    your fucking knees.