The Poetry of Sex (7 page)
Authors: Sophie Hannah
Tags: #Poetry, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Health & Fitness, #Sexuality
Hugo Williams
How do you think I feel
when you make me talk to you
and won’t let me stop
till the words turn into a moan?
Do you think I mind
when you put your hand over my mouth
and tell me not to move
so you can ‘hear’ it happening?
And how do you think I like it
when you tell me what to do
and your mouth opens
and you look straight through me?
Do you think I mind
when the blank expression comes
and you set off alone
down the hall of collapsing columns?
Leo Cookman
She loses her clothes
In seconds. Out stick her tits
Then she climbs on top
My cock between lips
Day and Night, joyful sucking,
‘Please cum in my mouth’
Hot, sweaty and hard
My dick in her hand, she wanks
Me to perfection
I spread her legs wide
And my head put between them
To lick her pussy
‘Your cock’s amazing’
‘I want your dick inside me’
My cock in her cunt
‘Now, cum on my tits’
‘You’re just so hot when you cum’
‘I’m stroking myself’
It’s lovely to lick
Around the dark nipples on
Her round and soft breasts
She sticks her legs out
As I fuck her so hard, she
Asks it deeper still
Ecstasy in moans
As I hammer forth, inside,
Out driving our cum
My cock soaking wet
Gloved by her slit, now dripping,
We fuck. In and out.
We shout then as I
Ejaculate inside her.
Warm, creamy and white.
I slide my spent dick
Out of her sodden, wet minge.
My lover I kiss.
Caked in each other’s
Kisses and sweat, on her I
Lie. Absolute bliss.
John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’
She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
Robert Frant
Your tongue gives such pleasure
When you, at your leisure,
Form words that I treasure –
Such filth, without measure.
Then later, the flicker,
First slowly then quicker,
Addictive as liquor,
Still making me thicker
And harder inside you;
Your mouth, open wide to
Take all I provide through
Your lips as I ride you.
Anna-May Laugher
On Audrey’s wedding night
she took a pin to bed;
stabbed her finger in the breathless dark
and dabbed the linen of the ‘breaking cloth’.
She made small sounds that passed for pain,
not sure it was enough, she stabbed again,
smeared a thumb-ful of redemptive blood
across the white of her stocking top.
Audrey was sixty when we met, lovely and vast,
like a dimpled sow in a yellow tabard;
always a scuff-chafe-scuff of thighs
as she mopped corridors and stairs.
Each day, once the Matins bell had stopped,
I’d wash left-greasy supper pots,
she’d squat and settle with toast and tea,
plotting lavish nuptials for her Marie.
She liked her family traditions,
the Kimber cloth for ‘breaking in’.
Five generations of bridal virgins
‘taken’ on it by eager men.
‘Well I saaaay five’ she said and smiled.
‘It wouldn’t matter now, but then …’
Irving Layton
The idle gods for laughs gave man his rump;
In sport, so made his kind that when he sighs
In ecstasy between a woman’s thighs
He goes up and down, a bicycle pump;
And his beloved once his seed is sown
Swells like a faulty tube on one side blown.
Jo Bell
Working different hours,
we settled for exchanging rude words
on the fridge.
my purple love juice spit on roses:
this member is a giant bore
.
I came alone into the tired house one night
and reached for milk. I saw
I in bed now
come
Jo Bell
You show up late
in your biker jacket
hoping that a quick roll
on my laminate flooring
will remedy all ills.
It will. But make it
a good one.
Peter Sansom
She said goodbye to common sense
and so they booked a room
in an afternoon hotel to holiday
with fecklessness in laundered sheets;
and there was an orchid
and a crisp new paperback,
the art gallery on a working day,
a second bottle opened and a third
knowing tomorrow in twenty years
they’d wake up with such a head,
a sink full of pots, the fridge
empty as Antarctica
and everything uphill again
in rain you could canoe
the middle of the street down,
which they did.
Sarah Salway
A winter night, his mouth on her breast
so soft the spring inside her wound tight
following the trail of it, his breath
whispering she should open up, not fight,
and she did, darling. She was one long
ache, hard to see where she ended
and he began. Then such strong
aching, hard to see where she ends
and the baby began. They become one long
whisper, opening up without a fight,
losing the trail of themselves, breath
so real the spring inside winds tight
feeling the shock of what’s happening
this spring night, new mouth on her breast.
Galway Kinnell
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run – as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears – in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on –
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body –
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
A. R. Ammons
One failure on
Top of another
Neil Rollinson
Waste not, want not you say as you
wring the last drops, the way
you’d get the dregs of the Burgundy
out of a wine box. You swallow the lot
like an epicure, a woman who hasn’t drunk
for weeks. I see the tongue curl
in your mouth, your lips sticky and opalescent
as it runs down your throat.
An elixir, that’s what you call it,
your multi-mineral and vitamin supplement:
amino acids, glucose, fructose, vitamin B12
(essential for vegetarians), vitamin C,
magnesium, calcium, potassium,
and one third of the recommended
daily dose of zinc. You wipe your chin
with a finger, and put the tip to your tongue.
The taste is acquired; like whisky,
and anchovies, you develop a passion.
It’s an aphrodisiac more efficacious
than rhino horn, or Spanish Fly,
it’s delicious, you say, as you grab my hair,
and push your salty tongue in my mouth.
Nic Aubury
To most men, the notion
Of ‘romance and mystery’
Means clearing the porn from
Their Internet history.
Nic Aubury
Their bed springs start to creak;
Their ardour has awoken.
That’s twice at least this week;
Their telly must be broken.
Robert Frost
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea);
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a Springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
A. F. Harrold
It has snowed and, not venturing out, it seems we must stay in,
draw the curtains back and see the winter light reflecting in
and stay in bed or share a bath and eat straight from the tin
heedless of staining the duvet which has become a sort of skin.
And with the thermostat turned up and with the wireless switched off
we do simply simple things that we know we do not do enough
and sometimes they have something to do with lofty things like love
or passion, perhaps, or loyalty, but at other times do not.
For sometimes it must be recognised that duties have stepped in
and regulated each of the hours that we have stretched between
dawn and breakfast, work and dinner and in time the heart wears thin.
And so today take off my wristwatch, let me lie down, breathe you in.
And in the silence between breathing some bird sings in the garden
and once again certain things between us start to harden.
Eva Salzman
So that the telling may not be diverse from the fact
–Dante
Sweating, his body becomes hot wax
moulding me. I want my impression to last.
The weight of him is a team of horses
lumbering over a wooden bridge,
shoving, shoving on the advance guard.
Not quite bravery, but eloquent brawn.
He runs whole pitches through the night.
A hundred ‘tries’, he’s no closer to goal.
Making his mark deep inside of me,
he stitches the laces of a cross, a dash –
he who loathes the intellectual.
With him I felt sublimely wordless. Until this.