Relationship

I'm sorry to stay covered up,
but that was so you
could possibly get to know me
for my other attributes,
not just my double D's.
You see it’s not that
I’m not proud
of my physical being;
just was hoping
you might find
a little cerebral stimulation
arousing,
take it to another
level--
something a bit
more conscious.
I mean let’s get serious
for a minute.
What do you want out of life,
and where do you see me in it?
Don’t wanna feel like
this is time wasted,
cause if it is
there's no reason
to even hold this conversation,
cause I need a man
who is able to express his self
yet not try and overshadow.
For though I want you to shine,
I need not be blinded by your ego.
I wish that I knew what was happening
when you looked at me
like my eyes could mirror yours,
and therefore
I could reflect
those innermost thoughts,
know you deep inside.
Cause after all,
they are the windows
to your soul.
But you curtain them
with heavy lids
or turn away,
as if to say,
“I don’t want you to know
what’s not already surfaced.”
Discover that
I too, like you,
am vulnerable sometimes,
but for every weakness
there is strength,
and maybe yours
is locked behind
that visual contact
you find so hard to make,
and that’s why,
when asked about
real emotions
you hesitate,
while my tears
make it blurry,
impossible to concentrate.
So I move on
and wipe away truths
with the back of my hand,
cause if you shed tears
and open yourself,
you think you are less
than a man.

      © Suzanne Saxon, 2012

Male-female intersex relationship
Wikimedia Commons
Serge Lachinov, 1914

Three Kingdoms

Animal

1.

Our mother,
molten animal,
shambles across
giant comet-singed ferns
and we follow.

Black milk cries
from flickering sockets
on her skinless body,
streaming down bone-ridge
and bare muscle-tissue.
Deep and pungent;
tasting of berry, spit-honey,
fecund ambrosia.

Our sap-stained mouths
fill with the pulse of new organs.
We caress each other
with unintelligible vibration,

tearing out with claws
the strands of hell-red neon
which held our epochs together,

collapsing together
our swarms of ecstatic flesh
formless as warm wax,
flowing streamlike
into quicksilver reservoirs.

2.

Living tempests! Carve epitaphs
on this ocean skin,
sharpen us crystalline
so we may rend apart
the solid ships
that drift by.

Trace our drifting nerves
with queasy venom and
fill our mouths
with orange spores
of sugar!

Blind our hexagon eyes
with a screaming white light!
Penetrate the folds inside us
as spirals of root flesh
to churn the vitreous fluid, bile, and blood
into vast slow-motion hurricanes!

Plant

1.
It took us a while to see
the electric blue veins
digesting our everyday architecture.

Wreaths, holographic,
held the sun in its thorns
to bleed silver noise into
empty quarries.

Radial stalks of cartilage
grow from the ground,
one thousand soft fingers
curling off to grasp empty air,
lost in the chaos
of molecular motion.

2.
Two trees speak to us,
raising their bark-scales
to braid quilts
of artery and chlorophyll
between us.

Nectaries leaked
burnt sugar
when their phrases held
a warmer tone,
when somber slicked
their flowers with formaldehyde.

These are the last words
in my human tongue.

By stretching fingers
across leaf-vein and root-coil,
we’ve found
a more moving vernacular.

Fungi (Mycelium)

It eats our undead dream-space
with flickers of worm-tongue;
the pores in time’s skin
are now widening.

We awake
tangled in mycelium.
Networks of dried spittle, lung-tube, and spider-cord
helixed tight around our skulls,
squeezing out fountains
of brain tissue into the wet summer air,
fusing into the spine’s raw node.

Our eyes burned out
after watching it tear into
the heavy opaquery draped over
earth’s inner star.

Now we dream awake and outside
our secret worlds
atomized by the screaming gravity
of black galaxies. 

© Luke Manning, 2012

 Root-tip mycelia of the Amanita
Photo from Wikimedia CommonsSource: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/178