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Love Songs (I)

1882 –

1966

Spawn of fantasies
Sitting 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


There are suspect places


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

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by this poet

Songs to Joannes, VII

My pair of feet
Smack the flag-stones
That are something left over from your walking
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching — — — — — — —

Mina Loy

1917

Brancusi’s Golden Bird

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype

As if
       some patient peasant God
       had rubbed and rubbed
       the Alpha and Omega
       of Form
       into a lump of metal

Mina Loy

2019

Apology of Genius

Ostracized as we are with God—
         The watchers of the civilized wastes
         reverse their signals on our track

         Lepers of the moon 
         all magically diseased
         we come among you
         innocent
         of our luminous sores

         unknowing
         how perturbing lights
         our spirit
         on the passion of Man
         until you turn on us your smooth fool’s faces
         like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

         We are the sacerdotal clowns
         who feed upon the wind and stars
         and pulverous pastures of poverty

Mina Loy

Poems

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Love Songs (I)

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