Helmut-SPREAD-6FI grew up fetishizing

the nubile antonyms of beauty

Helmut Newton’s exploitation

penis behind camera stroking

sloe-eyed girls with tired mouths

smoking yellow papered Gauloises

nipples grazing peach crinoline

men’s eyes like dry stones, seeking squeezing

I grew up thinking

contortion and bondage was

an art form not

excuse for masochism

as unsupervised child, I’d look through

graphic design manuals

that inexplicably had vulvas and

perky breasts

to illustrate Pantone

it was after all

the seventies

what did I know? Except

women on beaches without tops

giving me francs for not spilling their dirty martini’s

Mon sucre d’orge, sois gentil, va me chercher mes cigarettes

always gentleman watching

the rise and fall of female throats

nicotine mouths, stained vermillion

long tan legs swept beneath chiffon

men taking them to hotel rooms

children

smoking the leftovers whilst adults

fucked behind closed doors

wondering

when I grow up

how can I lie beneath

a girl whose sweat glistens

like marzipan

and if she should

sip on me I think I’d scream

all my silver bracelets falling off

like metal flowers on hotel carpet

after all

life is a film

where we tie ourselves up

with want and ritual

25 Replies to “Want & Ritual”

  1. How the world, by chance and design, educates our expectations of those wants and rituals, so much not as our elders would tell us they ought to be.

  2. Candice your poetry is beautifully raw , unique and filled with truths. I’m often left wordless, unable to do justice to your stunning and remarkable writing.

  3. Ah – I love your responses to my poems always they are poems in their own right or philosophy and I get a lot from them. Thank you and for your support always – more appreciated than mere words can convey.

  4. For you to say that just makes me beam from ear to ear you know what a compliment from you has! I hope you are going to buy the anthology we put a lot into it and i think it turned out really well I loved working with the girls I want to do something else now – badly! Love to you my Texan brother

  5. Ah Feather we are both children of the seventies….the bad bold decadent louche decade… you raise serious concern and yet this is fun and sexy…or is it just me. You know I am a huge fan of Newton’s fetishes… as well as want and ritual…needy greedy baby with a touch of extravagance and a burning desire for mystery. Bravo mon cheri.

  6. This is wonderful. Memories from a childhood… did we instinctively know better and just have it ‘educated’ away? And only now do we realize within the memory how wrong it all was?

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