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Aquarium

Chapter 20: Sonnet
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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Sonnet

MY soul is flailed by myriad little whips
That sweetly sting my tender thoughts, but yet
There comes a time when I would fain forget
The small red cruelty that’s in your lips.                    
Forget your eyes, that ferret me from sleep,
And, if no power can help me from above,
I’ll beat your slender body into love
And bruise your silken throat until you weep.
In violence is love omnipotent—
The subtlest is the fiercely-bitten kiss
That purity and passion interweaves
Until we never know what life has meant
And wait for the supremity of bliss—
The silent thunder floating in the leaves.