More poems from Tamed Dracaenae Published and Explained

AJ Huffman 

These poems can be found here.

Are they just two more poems published? I don't think so.

I am used to publishing announcements only on this blog. Not giving much of my opinion really, as if I was unable to do it. I am able to take position for or against, to make my viewpoints appear, to build, or write rather, coherent notes with solid arguments; I'm just too lazy to do it, that's all.

I share things on Facebook and Twitter, that's ever so easier than writing notes, posts, essays, even though I also started commenting on the pictures, and articles I share. Growing up, wanting to express myself, using my brain for more than just writing, reading, and teaching.

What could I say about this new publication? Not much really if I just wanted to talk about these poems generally speaking. I could make a literary analysis: saying that, again, both are full of me, my life, distorted by the prism of poetry and my maze-like psyche, to hide the most private parts of it.

Back in the 1990s ("there he goes again") most reviewers said my poems were full of love -- no they weren't just full of love but already tinted with sexual arousal -- but with decency -- they had better said naivety -- to hide my deepest feelings, and protect both these feelings and the "lovers", against what? Or whom? I don't know.

Fair enough. My 1990s-early 2000s poems are obviously not like those I have been writing since 2005. Their content and shape have evolved, changed, become less instinctive, more thoughtful, studied, pondered instead, as I really focus on one point or person or event, or group of them, to write. Something I should have done since the beginning really, but that's probably ageing, maturing, growing-up, to repeat it, that allow one person to advance into their craft.

So what about these poems? I would ramble if I said they were taken from a new collection of poems Tamed Dracaenae I have been working on since last December. I doubted the quality of this collection, the poems making it. I was not sure they would have the same impact as the previous ones from such collections as Maore, Carmine Carnival, The Loss, Twelve Times Thirteen or Crossing Puddles had had. I doubted I had written something good. I even started wondering if I had not wasted my time somehow, or spent days and nights filling in blank pages with dirt -- though I often consider my poetry like being just vomit, feces, or sperm on the page.

I recently compared the act of writing to a facial ejaculation. Stating that in a Facebook group triggered wrath from its owner, who was really crossed at me for just commenting briefly with cheap porn words, thinking it was just even cheaper provocation. It is not! I do consider most of my poetry like a facial ejaculation. I do write a lot about sex, and am obsessed with semen. In Crossing Puddles, to be published in December through Robocup Press, semen is everywhere, and in the forthcoming titles section of the publisher's website, Tamryn Spruill writes about the collection that "a thread of longing connects one poem to the next like the string of a lover's spit. Or semen."

How then could I dismiss my fascination for sex in general, sperm in particular? If "A Bowling Bowl in My Stomach" is more about the germination of a thought that will probably lead to the end of the present era, "The Rain Bows Down" is clearly a metaphoric poem in which I compare the rain to ejaculation, even making it clear that these ejaculations, that is to say mine, or those I receive from various people, are rainbows, full of colours, arc-shaped, springing from a land full of wonders, just like in the Bisounours' in French or Care Bears' in English,

Elena Kucharik's furry characters have become icons through the years for the gay community, and a popular saying stating that whenever something seems too cheerful, too good to be true, it is like living in this place. I definitely live and work in this place, but seem unable to make it stand as it is. Darkness, pessimism, lust, lies, neurosis, depression, insatiability, much more turbulence that leads me to fall, then write to be able to heal and feel a little better for some time.

Writing has been a therapy for me for twenty bloody years, after being baptized for the first-twenty-or-so, and I cannot separate my current state of mind from the impact Catholicism and all its wrongs have had on me.

Writing has become inescapable, better than any antidepressant pills.

To stop writing would be the end of me, psychotically first, physically in the short-term.