WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

Can’t hear the words ‘noli me tangere‘?
Don’t smile, don’t speak, don’t look, go on your way.
Don’t touch, don’t brush, don’t breathe, slope cowardly -
repulse, revile, repugnance; hateful fray.

Don’t care you swear of kinship, and you say
that people live as brethren; ugh. Not I.
It ain’t because your faggot mauve is fey;
it’s more because you’re human ham on rye.

Noli me tangere, I can’t deny
it tames my tempest, keeps the rabble back.
Most days – click-clack! click-clack! hell, let it fly;
don’t need a forty-five, I got a Mac.

Provide the porn n’ pills n’ piece-meal feed,
and in return – a fuckin’ first-class read.

☆

‘Noli me tangere’  (no-lee-mee-tang-jhu-ree) is Latin for ‘Touch me not’, supposedly said by Jesus to Mary Magdelene after Resurrection when she recognised him. Handily, it’s also in iambic meter. The above is an English Spenserian Sonnet, inspired by Bukowski on how far away he liked to be from ‘The Human Race’ -

[...] two inches is great, two miles is great, two thousand miles is beautiful.

Rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee

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James Joyce (1882-1941)

If I could write with the wit of Fry or Wilde, the word-
use of Thomas or Joyce, the intrigue of Pinter, the
invention and descriptive ability of Tolkien, the political
conviction of Marley, the imagination of Carroll or Lewis;

with the humour of Douglas Adams, Armando Ianucci,
or Dr Seuss, the linguistic innovation of Shakespeare,
the cadence of Longfellow, the narrative thrust of
Twain, the grit of Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, or Bukowski;

with the beauty of Cohen, the exhilaration of Kerouac,
the wisdom of Rumi or Gibran, the sweet tragedy of Lee
or Steinbeck, the epic grandiose of Homer, yet with my
own voice, then – and which is more – I’ll be a man, my son!

(Kipling ain’t too bad neither)

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd Lyricist, Bassist & Vocalist 1943- )

Armando Ianucci (Scottish-Italian Comedy Writer/Producer 1963- )

Bob Dylan (1941- )

Harold Pinter (British Playwright, 1930-2008)

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Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so

- J. Donne

Anne Sexton said? Saw Sexton dead
after Plath stuck her head in the oven.

Keats delivered from the coil, a tender
twenty-five, drowning in blood and lung oil.
Wandering cloud Wordsworth merciless when
he wrote, “…but to be young, very heaven”

Thomas had eighteen straight
before he knocked on the gate,
and Coleridge opium dreams.

Rimbaud slaked a sybaritic thirst -
hashish, absinthe, the wife of another -
to spice up a life ended early by cancer
and dearth of a Muse, an answer.

Bukowski stayed crapulous, sauced,
for a year or say three; still managed
to beer-shit the sublime-unseemly.

Wilde he was, well hung with the lads,
till they banged him up, his wracked Waterloo.
Broken health, yet wit intact, at death:
“Either that wallpaper goes, or I do”.

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Lamp-posts/Girls at dawn

Sex is for breeding. That’s it.
Like junk food – I salivate,
but afterwards feel sick.

The fucking smell
of post-coital bedsheets
is nauseating.

Bodily fluids, lubricants, latex and
Nonoxynol-9 spermicide stain bedclothes,
repugnate to the pit of the stomach.

Fucking is a messy inconvenience.

Nature kept tapping me on the
shoulder, I kept telling her to piss off.

Stop making me strut and preen and cartwheel
and sweet-talk and stand up against walls like that.
And say things I quite possibly don’t mean.

The girl walking past my piece of
pavement smarms sex at me
like honey dripping from a waffle-maker.

If I was asexual
I wouldn’t have picked her
out from the lamp-posts.

Dammit to hell
I wanna screw that thing.

☆

I’ve been reading Bukowski. Which may have influenced the tone of this piece, but to be clear: these are sentiments I have wanted to express since my early twenties, when I felt them keenly. I no longer feel this way, at least, not anything like as strongly, but if you construe the above poem to be misogynistic, then you need to reread it. My resentment was towards Nature for driving me to feel these urges, when quite often I really would have preferred to just be left alone to get on with my work, see friends, etc. Never did I take it out on any of the girls/women concerned, because I knew it wasn’t their fault. It was my battle with Nature. However, I believe that this problem can, and does, create misogyny if not kept in check and fairly thought-through. I own my part in it entirely.

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