Leah Potyondy ~ Save Rush

Patty Patten Tiffany

Strangelove Poetry

 

 

Leah Potyondy

Boy in the Box

What was the name
Of the boy in the box?
They sewed him up on a ship at sea
At seventeen
Degrees of turquoise spilling out the edges of his lips
Where the salt
Had made him white.
And when the needle slipped carelessly into his skin
—clumsy sailors, all of them, and what would his mother think
If she saw? She could certainly stitch a straight line.—
He didn’t even blink.
It was as though he were a statue
Plain and simple,
And the statue was sleeping
While the other young boys played tag around it.

 

 

 

Save Rush

The Concupiscent Admission

“So, you human man,
With your dichotomised nature,
Let me reveal what I offer
And may we see if you can resist.
But let me say, while I still am:
This will be no easy task.
Now follow the baseline in my voice
And you will arrive in the digital desert
With temptations amidst,
For one with a libidinous taste.

“Say?
Who am I?
Why, you should know...
I am your prurient division,
And I take dominion wherever you allow me.

“So, shall we commence?
O, human,
Listen to me and my speak
And I will remove the lid from my platter
So as for you to gaze upon
The delights of the profligate:
The long-legged mistress who captivate you
With her beauteous form
Yet reveal little of the sacrosanct portions
Which dwell within her spirit.

“But she can straddle your mind with her lewd motions,
Wrapping, around your cerebellum, her legs of lust,
And clouding your lucidity with her wanton dust,
Whispering the words of the scurrilous,
The catalysts of sexual arousal.

“And what of your abstemious compensations?
Do these make you laudable?
Of course not, human,
They simple render you moderating,
A perpetual victim of the quixotic attempts
Of the chaste institutions.

“’Be quiet!’ I am told
From your celestial division.
‘Keep your voice down
And do not utter your bawdy words!’

“What do you envisage, human?
A seraphic orgy with exaggerated movements
Of the erogenous zones of the body?
Well, let me inform,
And listen well...
As long as your time extends
Through this secular transition of life,
So every pulchritudinous aspect
Will not be respected for its purity
But rather for its ability, oh human,
To evoke your lascivious being.

“But once and only once,
And this be The Concupiscent Admission:
When thy test hath been,
And thy human thereby tried,
My dominion once possessed
Will be a dominion so taken
And destroyed unto the end.”

 

 

 

Patty Patten Tiffany

I walk the night

 

The heat from the sea

moistens my lips

my brow

 

as I walk the night

wayward muse

your memory

 

of lobotomy

sodomy

family.

 

I eluded in

ephemeral form

white nightgown wanderer

 

wisp of flesh

reaching for a touch

we could never feel.

 

Yours in madness, my darling,

as you stagger the sandy path

past palms and night jasmine

 

on damp Key West alleys

sharing the darkness

like secret lovers,

 

tantalizing lost auras

beyond Tennessee

beyond your Rose.