One of my (many) faults is a tendency to second guess myself. In the world of online poetry sites, this tends to arise in the context of ‘why did I post that poem, link, story, or picture?’ when I should have posted a completely different one. (The different one, of course, would have been much more cool, likeable, wowie-zowie.)
This past weekend, dVerse Poets Pub, a wonderful online poetry site, urged poets to post something taboo or provocative. Needless to say, I spent all weekend castigating myself for the poem I put up (about an important seaside activity.)
So, here it’s Tuesday, dVerse Poets “open link” night, and instead of moving on, I’m going to post another “taboo” poem, a sonnet, in, I think, a Spenserian format. I am also posting this poem for the Poetry Palace’s poetry rally. Here goes:
Spy Games
We played spy games galore in the basement.
Running spy games with the boys, our bent hands
guns, till sweating we lay down on cold cement,
shirts pulled up, chests hard. Not much withstands
the leaching chill of earth, the buried sands
beneath a downstairs’ room, except perhaps
the burn of nipple, the future woman’s
breasts. Our spy games just for girls had traps—
some of us played femmes fatales, poor saps,
while the leader girl was Bond—0-0-7.
She hung us ropeless from the bathroom taps,
then tortured us in ways that felt like heaven,
the basement bed our rack, what spies we were,
confessing neither to ourselves nor her.
The poem is published in Going On Somewhere. (The header is a detail from the cover by Jason Martin.) Check it out!
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