Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LOVE SONGS TO JOANNES, by MINA LOY


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LOVE SONGS TO JOANNES, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Spawn of fantasies
Last Line: Love - the preeminent litterateur
Alternate Author Name(s): Cravan, Arthur, Mrs.; Lowy, Mina Gertrude; Haweis, Stephen, Mrs.
Variant Title(s): Songs To Joannes
Subject(s): Dadaism; Love; Papini, Giovanni (1881-1956)


1
Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid - his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed - white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would - an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal - to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.

2
At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands

3
Night
Heavy with shut-flowers' nightmares
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun

4
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude

Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops of molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiencies
Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form - a blur
Anything
Than seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other

5
Shuttle-cock and battle-dore
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn

6
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern

7 Once in a messanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom's eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair

One bore a baby
In a padded porte-infant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose's wings

But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
-- Sweeping the brood clean out

8
Midnight empties the street
To the left a boy
One wing has been washed in the rain
The other will never be clean any more
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
-- The poor can't wash in hot water --
And I don't know which turning to take --
Since you got home to yourself first

9
We might have coupled
In the bedridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings

10
In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks

From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And the most of Nature -- is green

11
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager's revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun

12
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes

We sidle up
to Nature
that irate pornographist

13
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging light into the night
Never reaching


14
The skin-sack
In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completions
Of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
My fingertips are numb
from fretting your hair
A god's doormat
On the thredhold of your mind

15
And Time would be set back

16
I am the jealous storehouse of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
Behind God's eyes
There might
Be other lights

17
Dear one at your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colourless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odor
About your nervy hands

18
Today
Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible
To you
I bring the nascent virginity of
-- Myself -- for the moment
No love or the other thing
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In chaos

19
Seldom Trying for Love
Fantasy dealt them out as gods
Two or three men looked only human
But you alone
Superhuman apparently
I had to be caught in the weak eddy
Of your drivelling humanity
To love you most

20
We might have lived together
In the lights of the Arno
Or gone apple stealing under the sea
Or played
Hide and seek in love and cobwebs
And a lullaby on a tin pan
And talked till there were no more tongues
To talk with
And never have known any better

21
I don't care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut
Red a warms colour on the battlefield
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath

22
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager's revival
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
And flowered flummery
Breaks
To my silly shoes
In ways without you
I go
Gracelessly
As things go

23
The prig of passion
To your professional paucity
Protoplasm was raving mad
Evolving us

24
Love - the preeminent litterateur




Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net