Monday, January 7, 2013

Three Aspects of Desire

photo: w.e. lox (?)


Three Aspects of Desire
by F.J. Bergmann

I.  The Oscar Meyer Weinermobile:

            I incorporate the desires of the flesh, in all its senses.
            No picnic or parade is complete without me.
            See! I am shaped and colored like a penis grown monstrously large,
            with a pulsating engine and a steering mechanism.
            I am the waste parts of animals made savory
            for everyone to want and want and want.
            Devour me! Eat me!

II.  The cloisonné Chinese horse:

            I embody desire as well, but I serve the haunting needs of the spirit.
            Arabesques of colored love overlie the metal of the soul,
            which gleams through the glossy enamel in recurved ripples of gold,
            like fissures in rock showing the magma underneath,
            like a shuddering awareness of divine intervention.

III.  The soapstone coyote:

            I am the trickster, the messenger, the slippery one.
            I carry the purloined desires you let remain unvoiced,
            the unsent letter you forgot to burn and ransacked the house for.
            I race under snow-heavy boughs and across the frozen, wasted fields
            and cross the boundary between this world and the next.
            I make sure you get what you thought you wanted.
            I can talk to gods you would not dare to name.


~ first published in Malleable Jangle