Delirium (18 page)

Stupra: Three Scatological Sonnets

(Les Stupra)

1

Ancient beasts copulated on the run,

their glans coated with blood and excrement.

Our fathers puffed their big dicks out, displayed

their wrinkled foreskins and bark-grainy balls.

The medieval woman, angel or pig

asked for a lover with huge dimensions.

Even a Kleber, judging by his pants,

seemed to have debatable resources.

Man and the proudest mammals have one front;

their giant pricks are very like our own,

but a sterile period has struck, the horse

and the bull have bridled their white-hot heat,

and no one again will display genitals

in the woods where children invent first sex-games.

2

Our arse-holes are not theirs. Often I saw

men unbutton their pants behind a hedge,

and in those unembarrassed childhood baths

I studied the architecture of the arse.

Tight, and in most cases white, its easy curves

are formed by planes of muscles, and it
’s screened

by a network of hairs; for women it
’s a slit,

a groove black with tufted satin flowers.

A moving and wonderful inventiveness

of painted angels on a blue tableau

recalls the cheek where a smile indents flesh.

Oh! to be naked now, twitching for fun,

my head moving down on my friend’s fat cock,

both of us whispering in ecstasy.

3

Obscure and wrinkled like a violet

it breathes, worn out and modest amongst moss,

still wet with love, laid up on the buttock
’s

curved incline to the tangled pit.

Threads hang like gossamers of milk, small tears

pushed back by a rebuffing wind

over small clots of reddish marl,

they lose themselves in droplets on the slopes.

In my dream my mouth sucked at the crack,

my soul, jealous of this wild coitus,

makes it a tearful place, lamenting nest.

It’s the olive and the cajoling flute,

the tube from which heavenly praline flows,

feminine Canaan sticky with moisture.

*

About Jeremy Reed:

Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born writer, poet and prose stylist. Reed has published over seventy major works in twenty-five years. He has written more than three dozen books of poetry, fourteen novels, two autobiographies, and several volumes of literary and music criticism. He has also published translations of Montale, Genet, Cocteau, Nasrallah, Adonis, Bogary and Hölderlin. His work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and into more than a dozen languages.

He has received awards from the National Poetry, Somerset Maugham, Eric Gregory, Ingram Merrill, and Royal Literary Funds. He has also won the Poetry Society’s European Translation Prize.

Reed began publishing poems in magazines and small publications in the 1970s.

His influences include Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, J.G. Ballard, Stephen Barber, David Bowie and Iain Sinclair. Reed has a long history of publication with Enitharmon, Peter Owen and Creation Books.

Jeremy Reed has collaborated with the musician Itchy Ear. They perform live under the name Ginger Light.

Jeremy Reed’s website is
www.jeremyreed.com

Works by Jeremy Reed:

NOVELS:

The Lipstick Boys

Blue Rock

Red Eclipse

Inhabiting Shadows

Isidore (a novel about Lautréamont)

Red Hot Lipstick (erotic stories)

When The Whip Comes Down (a novel about De Sade)

The Pleasure Chateau (an erotic trilogy)

Chasing Black Rainbows (a novel about Artaud)

Diamond Nebula

Dorian (a sequel to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
)

Boy Caesar

The Grid

Here Comes the Nice

POETRY:

Target

A Long Shot to Heaven

The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg

Saints & Psychotics

Bleecker Street

A Man Afraid

By the Fisheries

Nero

Selected Poems

Engaging Form

Nineties

Brigitte
’s Blue Heart

Claudia Schiffer
’s Red Shoes

Turkish Delight

Red Haired Android

Kicks

Sweet Sister Lyric

Saint Billie

Black Sugar

Patron Saint of Eyeliner

Dicing For Pearls

Heartbreak Hotel

Duck and Sally Inside

Orange Sunshine

This is How You Disappear

Bona Drag

West End Survival Kit

Black Russian: Out-Takes 1978-9

Piccadilly Bongo

Bona Vada

Whitehall Jackals (with Chris McCabe)

Nothing But a Star

The Glamour Poet Versus Francis Bacon

TRANSLATIONS:

The Coastguard
’s House (Eugenio Montale)

Tempest of Stars (Jean Cocteau)

The Complete Poems (Jean Genet)

Praries of Fever (Ibrahim Nasrallah)

All That’s Left to You (Ghassan Kanafani)

On Entering the Sea (Nizar Qabbani)

The Sheltered Quarter (Hamza Bogary)

Hymn to the Night (Novalis)

NON-FICTION:

Heart on my Sleeve

Madness: The Price of Poetry

Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes

Caligula – Divine Carnage (with Stephen Barber)

Dead Brides (Edgar Allan Poe) – Introduction 

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) - Introduction

Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll) – Introduction

The Songs of Maldoror (Lautréamont) – Postscript

The Dilly – A History of Piccadilly Rent Boys

AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

Lipstick, Sex and Poetry (autobiography)

Bitter Blue (autobiography)

POETRY/PHOTOGRAPHY:

Pop Stars (1995) – with Mick Rock

Big Orange Day (2010) – with Lisa Wilkerson

Exploding into Colour (2012) – with Lisa Wilkerson

Above the Waves (2013) – with Lisa Wilkerson

BIOGRAPHY:

The Last Star (Marc Almond

Another Tear Falls (Scott Walker)

Waiting For the Man (Lou Reed)

The Last Decadent (Brian Jones)

Born to Lose (Jean Genet)

Delirium (Arthur Rimbaud)

A Stranger on Earth (Anna Kavan)

The King of Carnaby Street (John Stephen)

4 Poets &
 A Play (Ashbery, Gunn, Weiners, Francis Bacon)