WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

The fetid stench – the fettered, seething, bustling;
unkind to kith, the pith stays isolated.
Biodegradability in rustling
black plastic sacks and body-bags, frustrated

by rank bloodlust and bloodiest of skirmish.
Obscene onscreen finagling pity-putty;
as night claims sketchy sundown, thighs lose firmish.
The flickered violence; dick-avid slutty

slysinks the skull and shapes a man’s demeanour.
The keener and the vulner’ble affected,
manhands are dirtier (and yet, they’re cleaner).
A penitentiary: no doubt elected,

but chance to move with Truth is mealy-meagre.
Vow oust the housed-in self that dampens eager.

✩

An experiment using feminine end-rhyme (stress/unstress to end the lines – eg ‘mea gre’/’ea ger’) in English Sonnet format (lines have their ten syllables of iambic pentameter, plus one unstressed on the end).

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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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Chimera (English Sonnet)

Like ancestors, she breathes the arid air
in climes of coarsest beauty, red the stone;
the blushing fractured earth is leafless-bare,
while he inhales dense greens and hills, alone.

Alarmingly exotic brown, her eyes
that look and want beyond their quandaries;
disarmingly erotic brown, her thighs
that restless, want beyond their boundaries.

Mouth drawing him, a siphoned fluid, hot
like some illicit truck petroleum,
he wonders if what she can taste is not
the hot, but water, seas of tedium.

That searing sphere he feels too near again,
her wicked sun. Chimera she’ll remain.

Chimera (free verse)

Like her ancestors
breathing arid desert air
climes of coarse beauty -
red rockpiles,
blushing, fractured earth -
as naturally as he inhales greens
and sad, time-weary stone
of rural England

Alarmingly erotic, disarmingly
exotic brown eyes
keep watching, watching
beyond vanishing point
beyond self-manifest horizons

Drawing him, siphoned fluid -
hot on her tongue
like illicit petroleum.
Breathe fire!
Or water to the taste?

Thousands of miles of it between,
enough to drown her wicked dustbowl sun;
still he heats like that searing sphere

when they meet, but
chimera she will remain.

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.

See as I banquet, dining with the King,
and esoteric Arts taught me, the Mage.
Up dancing with the Queen, hear voices ring,
we cheek-to-cheek upon a festooned stage.

Oh, sing me silly with the minstrels! Mirth,
yes jesting lowbrow banter with the Fool.
Rough-hewn, we raise our flagons like a serf,
unsteady, glorious, on wooden stool.

Down in the kitchen mixing with the cooks,
and taking time to serve the slaves’ old bench.
I won’t be stopped from shooting furtive looks,
that sexual glance to chance the scull’ry wench.

Yet sudden: horribly, I seem unfit;
there’s no rejoining Court where I should sit.

☆

Written in 2005 as a ‘modern’ Shakespearean Sonnet with short lines (no iambic pentameter), and looser rhyme-scheme, now expanded to full Shakespearean Sonnet. The bones of this written when very unwell indeed, totally bed-bound. The descent through a Medieval Court hierarchy and the resulting inability to rejoin my Sovereign is a metaphor for what happened to my life. I lay in bed for a very, very long time. Anyone wanting to see the original ‘modern’ version, click here.

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☆

Her buoyancy fools actuality
and mocks the stupid smartphone in my hand.
It sits nonplussed, not cut her mustard, and
she’s been released, and unpoliced by me.

Well, fuck the wallow. Hard to swallow, though.
In breath, I’m jittery; I’m made to jump.
The Ovaltine’s become a silly lump.
I saw kaleidoscopic crystal snow,

it melting, muddying, revoltingly.
She left me hanging as she straight hung up;
a pity I have such a damn hang-up.
She artfully took in, withdrew, from me.

A lover’s touch across the flaming wire
she touched me once, just once, and I was fire.

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Beauty and the Beast (Italian Sonnet version)

Rampaging Southerly, and to the North,
He riots Westerly, towards the East;
this slavering, uncouth Poetic Beast
parades and pukes His Poetry face-forth.
Damn bangs! and bangs! upon my wooden door.
Caress me, hold, possess me, Beauty-Beast -
molest me, that, do that for me, at least.
Please, defecate upon my oaken floor.

Your silent shrieks are drowning bleeding ears,
agree to hold me, scold me, Beauty-Beast.
In violent dreams I writhed and spilt my tears;
with plume and sweat, swiftscribbling stormy fears -
undoubtedly: no You, no words, no feast.
Are You to leave me, after all these years?

☆

Beauty and the Beast (English Sonnet version)

Rampaging Southerly, and to the North,
He riots Westerly, towards the East;
this slavering, uncouth Poetic Beast
parades and pukes His Poetry face-forth.

Damn bangs! and bangs! upon my wooden door;
caress me, hold, possess me, Beauty-Beast
(molest me, that, do that for me, at least).
Please, defecate upon my oaken floor.

Your silent shrieks are drowning bleeding ears,
agree to hold me, scold me, Beauty-Beast.
With plume and sweat, swiftscribbling, fears unleashed
in violent dreams I writhed and spilt my tears.

Undoubtedly: no You, no words, no write.
Are You to leave, bereaving me, tonight?

☆

Two versions of the same poem here, as I wasn’t sure which one to go with; both seem to have their merits and their flaws. The first is in the Italian Petrarchan Sonnet form, but with a less usual sestet rhyme-scheme (c-d-c-c-d-c). The flaw in this one is that the Volta/turn (resolution, or at least, change in tone), comes at line twelve rather than after the octave (first eight lines/first two quatrains), therefore following the English Volta placement (where it comes after line twelve, with the rhyming couplet). The second is an English Sonnet, but I have employed the envelope quatrain (a-b-b-a), rather than the normal a-b-a-b for this form. It is an accepted variant, however (the ‘English Canadian’). The flaw here is that the second quatrain rhymes the same as the first (as if it was an Italian Sonnet). I’m curious – which of the two versions do you prefer?

This is about my love-hate relationship with Poetry. Enough said…

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She passes him and looks away distant,
his asking eyes denied, brushed off and lost.
The pavement’s hard and cold, a man-made fist
and fights his shuffling feet through thinning frost.

Another passes quick, want swells and dies;
with sighs, a cab is pulled from Tarmac path.
Outside he’s smiling suns; within he cries -
They cannot know a thing beneath my laugh.

The night is lost in blurring lines of white,
and stuck to sticky faking leather seat,
he ponders on the crawling stream of lights,
hands held to window, stroking at the sheet.

The driver’s eyes they glint and show the moon;
he takes his fare and winks – I’ll see you soon.

☆

I wrote this Shakespearean/English sonnet in my First Year at University (1998/99). It’s one of the few pieces I penned back then that I can still look at without cringing. Now it’s had an edit, I think it’s scrubbed up quite well.

Shakespearean Sonnet structure as follows:

Fourteen lines comprising three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, ten syllables per line in iambic pentameter,  and a Volta/turn (resolution or change in tone) coming with the closing couplet. Rhyme-scheme: a-b-a-b / c-d-c-d / e-f-e-f / g-g

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