Adeena Karasick

video from THIS POEM

Salomé: Woman of Valor 

I

In axes of excess succulent access

of wracked tracks, flexed nexus sequestered, vexed lexis 

Come 

in the thickness of 

history mystery mastery matrices

Come with me 

through borders orders laws flaws codes

of urgent perversion.

Come crowded with fluid runes perfumed

and naked, thirsty as plumy flumes  

Come misty vitreous

prodigal and unspeakable in lusty veils 

Come holy in shaded legends

of puzzled ardor, martyred

in the curls of coiled cries a chorus of cursed whorls

scorched with countenance 

with outlaw fictions, fluid swoons, wounded

in coded collusion

II 

Suffer me to touch thy body. Thy body is historical like the body of a lapsed eloper. Like a festered will of vaporous quills; like a palace of scrawled carousels nested with puckered longing. It is inhabitable; thy body is humming with harrowed imminence; parsed like the clusters of fractalled gaps wrapped in flitting iterates, like the cinders of aberrance, rephrased with effluvial ruses, a salience that dwells in the wresting foray studded with brokered heresy. Suffer me to touch thy holy precipice. It is like a crown of torn placards; like a knot of uncertainty coiled round thy neck. I love not your heresy,  but your entwined verity; effluvia flossed in the gardens of eros, and fettered with gilded triggers. Your body like a branch of echoic clusters that phishers have found in the twilight of caesurae! scattered  in the mines of ebullient looms which lines the brow of clanging passion tainted with malleable tales. There is nothing in the world so holy as your body.

III

Through the fercockte gawk-stalkin’ hack stackers 

of antiquity trickery lexically-licked sticky flickering

Salomé, you are bringing in the big guns

Opening the sluice gates

with your hyper dramatic excess

Flexed with  swishy riffs, pithy spiff grifters

Like a shattered chatter box schadenshow  

like a discordant accordion  

like manna from mayhem

you are ebullient as you blow

like a feisty 

zeitgeist, a forever riviera

and i say hula lily hillbilly, billiard bombast

ho-hum hum de lilah bruja hoo-ha slap trap 

of schizmatic revisionism

And take your slinky hijinx, pixie 

fixity of prurient lure of twirly whirlers 

a contretemp tempestuous extempora & lay me down in  

an elixir mixer of lexically robust postulates

which say ce soir bette noir, 

of gnarly parlors 

in a coughing scoffed cacophony of  

acrostic biscuits

a miscued skew of super cinder cendre 

slippery ceiling singing

in the flotsam frayed refrain. stay

IV

When to cut is to bind,

take me

and as you come

to the tenet of my house. In the bed that is

spread across this lexicon

bind me

in the splendor of our haunting

bind me to your wrists

to your forearms, your fingers

bind me

with your leather strapped 

heritage histories rituals traditions

bind me

with your tableaux fabliaux 

of ragged madness

aberrance, labyrinths

bind me

in prophecy, sophistry

as i taste you

all palistrophically erotic and

threaded with hysteria

bind me to your doorposts bedposts

For in my death i taste you

with the paradox of worship. 

V

oh silly may, solo me oh, 

salo salo me no sweat, no 

way no slough sallow may laced with liaised 

no  shidduch shadow shakes aching 

pal mal! salomé  swirl no slam dunk oh sally swing low --

salomé ride sally ride like a resale sale oh sally sally mae be my girl sally sally song sally sayin something mustang sally headlong agon gone so langue tall sally

salient alias  wholesale sally down wind done gone 

done rot her s[ou]lamé  slayin lass, salomé so lay me down sally 

don’t slow me with your tally sally hey dolly dolly  psalm soullier what sally say salomé  slalom mal Allez! andelez salomé 

holy olé salomé me softly

tallying the cadences

of aphoristic rings

 VI

And i will kiss thy myth, Iokhanan. i will kiss it now. i will bite it with my teeth as one bites rapt truth. Look at me Iokhanan with your eyes of ragged aggregates, all heretically erotic, despotic of oscillate postulates impossibly flawed, There was nothing as luxurious as your eros, as real as your myth. Hidden perfumes plumes, feverish with fettered whispers, scattered prayers. How I love you! still Iokhanan; athirst for your lips, fingers, tongue and neither wandering silence nor rippled absence can shadow these ravenous apertures. Neither the fluid lumen ominous numena can assuage the throbbing of volleyed values, verity, veils veins of fire. Look at me, I have kissed your mouth, Iokhanan, I have kissed your myth. And on your lips, the taste of bold lobbying the taste of love; love they say, like scattered lace. I have kissed your myth.

from THIS POEM:

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Adeena Karasick is a gematriatic alchemist and lives among the letters in Alphabet City.