Friday 3 September 2010

On What Men Do at Literary Events.

I posted this on what seems to be a redundant blog, a while ago.
"The Sisterhood of the Pointy Heel (incorporating also the Knights of the Besmirched Countenance)", seems to be defunct. It was a blog which made fun of the battle of the sexes.  I kinda..... infiltrated....


But. 


I love this pome. It's a deliciously naughty counterblast to the po-faced drones who take literary events too seriously.

At the Poetry Reading,   by John Brehm

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—
they’re so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I’m no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he’s on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining
myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.