Five Poems by Duane Vorhees

 

THE OBLIGATIONS OF A FREEDMAN

 

I'm attentive to the tempest

but ignore the lioness

that hunts from within.

 

And I fear the inner disease

but yearn to embrace my temptress.

Again and again.

 

I am more than I am, and less.

I'm self and society.

 

Illusions of reality

manifest as machines,

not as holograms,

 

or Self succumbs to anarchy,

freedom enslaves identity.

Chaos is the plan!

 

Tradition's electricity

depends on historic currents.

 

One duty of once-observants

is to strengthen the still-fervent

to resist truth's blasts.

 

Masters of self are the servants

who attend the Now's sacraments

though its moments passed.

 

SANCTIFIED

 

Impatient to cohabit,

the shot in the hunter’s gun

and his fiancée rabbit

rendezvous in the red dawn.

 

This sacrament of union

consecrates nature’s sabbath.

 

The 10th-generation nun

inherited the habits

of her ever-gracious mom

and that unchastened abbott.

 

They celebrate the sabbaths

and god honours the unions.

 

A MIND REWINDS

 

My psyche is littered with living Its.

Disregarded superegos still whine,

erotic remnants writhe among the crypts.

Od and Ob hiss between young green vines.

 

Disregarded superegos still whine.

Bony hilltops strain to catch day’s first light.

Od and Ob hiss between young green vines,

their bloodguilt insufficiently contrite.

 

Bony hilltops strain to catch day’s first light,

erotic remnants writhe among the crypts,

their bloodguilt insufficiently contrite.

My psyche is littered with living Its.

 

SIEGE

 

The walls I wear withstand

the world's battering rams,

mangonels, and catapults.

The walls I wear protect

against the firm attacks

of your constant sappers' love.

 

 

UNLUSTING

 

If your vaginal kindling

stops firing my effigies,

will other environments

break into our quarantine?

 

The waters of the fountains

have frolicked through every day

while all the time draining back

into the underground's black.

 

Can proud naked expression

become clothed in words at last?

 

The unlusting of passion

must soon commence some passage

of a shape into a shadow

when my kisses don't redden

your features any longer.

 

Today may be eternal

but the yesterday is long.

And the yesterday is long.

Duane Vorhees is an American poet living in Thailand. Before that, he taught University of Maryland classes in Korea and Japan. Hog Press, of Ames, Iowa, has published three of his poetry collections and is preparing a fourth.