Out of the stinking crypt, he warns: noli me tangere

For a brief period of time, I neglected this blog late last year, and perhaps into the beginning of 2014, largely due to an effort to work on my poetry and increase the length of some of my short fictions to something akin to book length.  Every group is political.  Every group leader, and definitely every group "owner," is charismatic, meaning that relationships too easily dissolve into dichotomies that are known to be false but working out the truth can be just the distraction to drive a working writer away.
So I left, downloading, I thought, all of my work -- in case I wanted to get back to work on any of it, if I ever regained the sang froid and the imagination necessary to such travail. This evening, I received an unexpected email from this writer's site, telling me that one of my poems had received a new comment. No writer of small literature can resist a comment ("maybe it will help me grow..." actually means "maybe someone really liked it!"). The reason I could not recollect the poem was that it was a final volley aimed at a truly scary individual, constantly posing as someone else in private messages, hitting on vulnerable individuals, claiming a mastery of zen, but mocking zen at every opportunity, mocking everyone at every opportunity, until he could not keep track of his games, therefore his game pieces promptly developed a new pastime of biting the gamer on the ass.  This was my chunk of butt on my way out -- and he apparently JUST found it!  Aloeswood was his moniker, hence my addressing "Aloe's Wood."
So it's an ad hominem poem, I am sad to say, and yet -- I like it.  It is, by definition, a fallacy.
But what poem is not?

Out of the stinking crypt, he warns: noli me tangere

Aloe's wood, you forget yourself.

Easy enough to do under

circumstances, bobbing just

under water, long lost

zen,

O!

As an aside -- though I held

an incarnation of you dear --

I also hold the piquant

long steel stylus,

the stylus styled to replace

Jesus' reaching, trembling,

wanting and weak, weak 

hand, the stylus made

for the sticking

into you,

or lamb, or a pigeon's heart,

when I do voodoo kebobs

on the deck on

warm summer nights. 

At the last electric flutter

of the urban bird's misfiring

pump, I squawk this truth:

How much you do hate

the Zen you "study"!

A scholar's pet, you

are:

O!

Which is granting you

a huge mofo of a self-deception,

but you must know I strive

but for peace.  Ho!

[Hiding in my room / safe within my womb...]

I've always loved the brief smack 

of the organ after

Don't talk of love

[organ smack

organ smack]

I've heard the word before; 

It's sleeping in my memory. 

I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. 

If I never loved I never would have cried. 

I am a rock, 

I am an island. 

It's such an insipid song 

and I've heard people

reference its zen while

just a reprobate few of us

hear Buddha's high-

pitched giggle.

She said:

O!

You could not have known

not without hiring

some tired detective,

how dear to me,

academically,

is the Magdalene.

So it's a throw-down, man-boy,

if you can girdle your womb

for the duration.

[I'll be gone in

twenty-nine days:

O!]

The most important words

to pass between them,

midst balm-imbued

greasy hairs waxing

dirty sweat-stinking 

mildly hairy skin

(maybe hairless altogether,

by design or by aesthetic)?

The most important words

hit on by sixteenth, seventeenth

century Italians,

some lesser Dutch

(Who are the Dutch?),

the always overlooked

-- for edginess --

Spaniards, elongated, the spike,

the piercing spine put second

place,

and even later, still, even as tardy

as the nineteenth century,

the Brits, on whom the whole

idea is lost

[You've some Brit in you,

I believe.  Some offshoot,

something?];

All with oiled bristles

painting plump and ivory hands

on a single brazen marble tit

(Courtesans with your selfsame

madly timed grimace

meant to charm:

Twirl and twist the nipple --

O!

Pull it long, taut taut taut,

rub the nub

zenzenzen zoom zoom)

The words that mattered

and summed, that added

surfeit to globs of tint

were noli  me  tangere

O!

The instant zen

of spiritual anatomy.

Author Notes

PHOTO/Painting CREDIT:,  noli me tangere motif in detail by Michelangelo and Pontormo

© 2013 L. Ryan