“She tosses her pink cap onto my head and taking a sip of red wine from my cup bends to kiss my dark eyes.
BY YUYUTSU SHARMA
AN APWT PUBLICATION
Mona Lisa’s drunk
from the jasmine scent of her secret fish
drunk from
the magic fruit of her sex,
drunk and stoned
from reveries of hi-tech city’s space cakes.
Mona Lisa’s drunk
from her green eyes’ glamour
that open and kiss
quivering doors of the temple of my face.
Her skirt swirls
in the cold colorless skies of Europe.
Her mysterious smile,
a succulent ploy, demanding
forbidden touch on the crimson Cut
that denies and even divides the divine.
I mildly tug at her scarlet scarf,
wrapping it round my neck, dance,
holding her slender waist
along the shores of Northern Sea flooded
at this hour from goods
and god men from Asia.
Stars above speak
of a vanquished history of sails
eloquent as
Leonardo Da Vinci’s brush.
It’s here somewhere one time
mandalas of my defeats were drawn.
Along these shores Alexander’s horses laughed
and leered before beginning that sojourn into the heart of darkness.
Along these blue waters
I smell the gunpowder that once burst
the chest
of the Continent into blood-soaked fragments.
Years before my birth
it’s here somewhere that captors
of Mona Lisa
wrote her ambiguity and my future.
Today she’s drunk.
She drools over psychedelic visions of LSD and Ecstasy
spinning mysteriously
like a supernova in the embrace of infested stars.
“I live in a car,” she confides.
“I live on the blade of this city’s screaming sirens.
I survive on the endless night
in a squatted artists’ bar.
I dance on full moon’s face
all through the night’s eternal orgasm
till I melt and become one — cup and the bar.
My lips purple blue,
my eyes swollen like Aristophanes’ frogs,
blade of my sleek tongue,
my long leathery fish in my mouth
reeking of sulfa and exhausted sea shores.
I burgeon on the Hippie smoke of Sixties.
Spiritualists, Swamis and Surrealists have
masturbated white lotus of my slender body.
Dadaists and Beatles have sucked
salt of my soul for decades.
Buddhists have licked me clean
like stone pillow under sleeping Siddhartha’s neck.
Avant-Gardes have lain at my bed for years.
The Punk I taught flowers have fire in them.
I’ve been traveling now for decades
I’ve been to Amazon and Americas.
I’ve been on the Asian loop:
Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam,
Thailand, India, China.
I’ve plans to visit Tibet,
Kathmandu, Kandahar, Kabul, Kashmir.”
She tosses her pink cap onto my head
and taking a sip of red wine from my cup
bends to kiss my dark eyes.
“It’s your turn now,
Yu Yu, you man from Asia,
any moment I can pull a blanket
from my car and spreading it
like bejeweled sky
can go into a Tantric trance.
And maybe, maybe,
maybe tonight make love to you
on currents of Euro’s swelling tide.”
Yuyutsu Sharma is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, and is a Himalayan poet and translator. He has published ten poetry collections. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits, Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
The banner image is by Filepe Vieira and downloaded from Unsplash.com
A powerful poem, Yuyu
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