Invocatio

I will never be your Muse but I can fuck your Muse:
Erato down from Olympus with purple lipstick slashed across my teeth and the wind of the passing trains grinning across our prickled skin, Euturpe catching my wink across the bar when the night has gone to fairy lights and drum & bass and cheap beer that tastes like your first party,

I can scrape my teeth across your Muse’s cunt, myrtle leaves and roses – red – and leather and salt, you can watch if you want: she screams flute arpeggios and birdsong and the taste of her acid-slicks my throat.

I mean to say, I won’t be what you want, but I can get you what you want: Sappho’s lyre, a gold-bowed kithara with every string snapping under your hand –

You can pretend the Muse isn’t weeping my name, if it’s easier.
You don’t speak birdsong anyway. And you don’t remember my name –
that isn’t what you needed for your poem. The lines come after she does.
Boys like you don’t write poems about me.

Listen. There’s a fire somewhere, and past it a cave, old waters and old wagers, cold truth.
My Muse lives there and she could shatter you like a dead tree:
Apollo in red lipstick and Athena with a tangle of hemp rope, the bubbling well, the tendrils of the sun coursing through your veins, a wind lacing through pipes, a lover’s kiss, a shade.

Merlin Cunniff

Warning –

Love is a stranger

Love is a stranger
In an open car
To tempt you in
And drive you far away
And I want you
And I want you
And I want you so
It’s an obsession
Love is a danger
Of a different kind
To take you away
And leave you far behind
And love love love
Is a dangerous drug
You have to receive it
And you still can’t
Get enough of the stuff
It’s savage and it’s cruel
And it shines like destruction
Comes in like the flood
And it seems like religion
It’s noble and it’s brutal
It distorts and deranges
And it wrenches you up
And you’re left like a zombie
And I want you
And I want you
And I want you so
It’s an obsession…

Annie Lennox & David Allan Stewart

Haunted by voices

I think of Virginia Woolf, who sank wordlessly into the river, her pockets weighted with stones. Haunted by voices, by waves, by lights, in love with colours — blue, green — seized by a sort of bizarre gaiety that brought on the fits of strangled, hooting, uncontrollable laughter remembered by Miss Brown.

Or I think of the dark corner of the deserted farmhouse in the Russian countryside where, a few months later in that same year, 1941, Maria Tsvetaieva hanged herself […] Tsvetaieva, the most rhythmic of the Russian poets, who wrote: My problem (in writing poetry, and my reader’s problem in understanding my poems) consists in the impossibility of my task: for example, to express the sigh a-a-a- with words (that is, meanings). With words/ meanings to say the sound. So that all that remains for the ear is a-a-a-.

Or Sylvia Plath, yet another woman disillusioned with words and meanings, fled to the refuge of lights, rhythms, sounds: a refuge that already announces, for those who know how to read, the silence with which she will abandon life.

Julia Kristeva
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

a woman possessed by devils

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own