My First Love (#poetry #sonnet #erotica)

Long before I started writing erotica, I was a poet.

Well, at least I was writing poetry. Love poetry, mostly, or maybe lust poetry. When you’re a teenager, it’s hard to tell.

Nobody taught me to write verse, though my parents did read poems to my brother and me from a very early age. Finding rhymes, feeling the rhythm of the words, seemed to come naturally.

Poems were how I expressed my emotions. They were private, personal, efforts to capture a moment. Little conscious art, and certainly very little deliberate craft.

Then in the late nineties, I started writing and publishing prose. Somehow, the well of poetry dried up. I think this was partly because I’d gotten over a good deal of the angst from my teens and twenties.

In the past decade, encouraged by my friend and colleague Ashley Lister, I’ve starting writing some verse again. The experience is very different, though. Ash is an expert on different poetic forms. Many of my recent poems were experiments using forms he proposed in his monthly exercises at the Erotica Readers and Writers Associationblog. The emotion is still there, but I’m much more conscious of the process, and the result.

I still seem to have a sense for the way words chime and combine, though.

Just for fun today, I’m sharing a couple of poems. The first is more than twenty years old. It’s not in any particular form. The second I wrote in 2015, and is the form of a Petrarchian Sonnet.

To be honest, I like them both. But in a very real sense they were written by different people.

Meditations on a Crescent Moon

(To GCS)

a bright thorn lodged in my flesh,

scarlet petals crushed on my breasts;

silver hook reeling me in;

scimitar pricking my skin.

clipping of a fingernail,

charm to bind; scorpion's tail,

sweetest poison in the sting,

fever dreams; broken ring

of the ancient myth,

how I shall know

my other half.

silken curl

from some platinum plait;

comma—a pause,

saying hush, wait.

light leaking beneath the door,

beneath the blindfold—

nothing more,

in the darkened room

but a lingering kiss

and the rough caress

of the bonds

on my wrists.

Burlesque - Petrarchian Sonnet

Black satin glove discarded on the floor;

a smooth descent of zipper down your spine

disclosing inch by inch, by clear design,

a glimpse of pearly flesh. You promise more

than you deliver. Desperate, we implore,

we beg you, Take it off. You pout, recline,

expose a shapely leg where slits align,

content for us to hunger and adore.

A sultry soundtrack drives you to reveal

in increments the charms your clothes conceal.

In thong and tassels finally you pose;

a teasing smile, a shimmy, then you steal

away to leave me with a racing heart

and wonder: is this Lust or is it Art?