Anthony Madrid – Two Poems


Anthony Madrid

Two Poems

Let’s Watch This Liver-Colored Devil


LET’S watch this liver-colored devil, making his way down Lovers’ Lane.
I want to watch him walk up the wall at the dead end of Lovers’ Lane.

Let the wicked man and the wicked woman shut their complaining mouths.
I shall come round to them presently, shall give them a pond in which to mate.

They are dreaming, these uplifters.  They look for great things from a foolish people.
They are still operating at the level of “the truth shall set you free.”

Let the poet boy write his own language, and I don’t mean his mother tongue.
Let him write the language that results from having his precious ego SOCKED in the eye.

I used to think I favored the old horsetrader’s attitude towards beauty:
A squinting, shrewd, and capitalist eye.—What a lie!

I came back to NYU and said, “New York: always something to look at.”
And I meant one enslaving beautygirl after another.

Ah, the lewd toddler’s a natural thief, and whatever he steals he puts in his mouth.
He is perpetually finding pearls to pop into his obscenely white oral oyster.

A book is a dead thing: take it to bed, you’re asleep in a minute.
Whereas, if a friend is lying next to you, talking—you stay up all the night.

That’s the way to write, MADRID!  Be like a pillow-talking friend—
A good friend, full of question and answer, head propped up on one hand . . .


No More Epigrams Against Sluts

NO more epigrams against sluts.  For it galls me to have to hear
These pig men and buccaneers complaining against every little unauthorized blowjob.

In my village, hoarding wisdom is forbidden; it’s considered criminal
To pile up supplies you yourself can never use.

The science of subdivision, of cutting things up smaller and smaller,
Tells us there’s an almost-eternity between the needleprick and the sting.

We put a glue-trapped mouse in a bag, press it still, and give it one hammerstroke.
Is no one provoked by the thought that we’re creating an eternity of pain—?

There is another kind of obsessional flirting: got nothing to do with sex.
It has to do with trying to toggle the balance of authority.

I have no objection to people’s being fascinated by beauty; I object
To the way people respect it, the way they fall silent in its presence.

Men are in all things perverse!  They neigh like Buggeranthes to jam
The three-pronged electrical plug into the double-dimpled outlet.

But where the wire staves of a whisk intersect is filth and corrosion’s worksite.
Likewise, the shadow one casts on oneself is Wicked Cupid’s bull’s-eye . . .

MADRID you will not escape censure, for all your hide-and-seek irony.
The very ambiguity is obnoxious.

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