Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In preparation for another posting, to come, on (men’s) underwear terminology (see, most recently, here and here), I now offer you a draft poem inspired by one of the images I started with. The image will come later in this posting, in case you don’t want to be surprised by homoerotic apparel ads popping up on your computer. The poem is explictly sexy, in case that bothers you. And all of this has only negligible connections to linguistics, in case you want to avoid other stuff (though we could talk about gay men’s appropriation of tit ‘nipple’).

Waiting for Golden State Rufskin Tit
(a riff on “Lions like Golden Dogs” and “Rufskin California Vintage”)

insolent,
enticing, you
and your buddies
thrust
yourselves upon me,
offering
your sex.

golden-brown sun-man,
shirt-lifting muscle-man,
shining with hot sweat, you
want
me to
want you,
lick that hard
tit, bitch,
pull down those briefs
with your teeth, slut,
make them
wet with your spit.

I come back to the
rocks at Land’s End,
bathed in
California gold,
for you to give me the hot
burst of your sex,
burn off
the California day
into dusk.

ok, it’s cheap
quicky sex, even
washed in my shiny
words of poetry, but then
what did I expect from a
stud selling
fashion underwear?

…..

Excerpts from “Lions like Yellow Dogs”. There is more, with nasturtiums, marigolds, and of course the King of Spain. A favorite poem, in a wonderful book:

There are lions, like yellow dogs, under
my feet

… The sun is beginning to burn off
the California day.
And already I am thinking of twilight.

… Gold,
orange,
red,
the yellow of lions.

… Wanting you to be that sun,
red-gold,
warm

(from Diane Wakoski, Waiting for the King of Spain (1976),”There are Lions like Yellow Dogs”)

And now the image:

(Note the remarkable piece of clothing on the guy on the left. This is known in the trade as a wrestling singlet, a singlet, or a wrestler.)

This entry was posted on July 1, 2010 at 7:22 am and is filed under Gayland, Not about language, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.