The City is My Mistress - by Riccardo Berra (c) 2012 all rights reserved

You know you're out there walking
 and one line,
then an entire UNiverse sneak up to complete in your head?
send a shiver up your neck, and a shine down your spine,
So beautiful, accurate and bold of you
You should
whip out that bloody smartphone or stone tablet
and get it down
fast as you can,
But you don't

You tell yourself 
You'll remember,
You set to remembering,
get home,
You set to forgetting,
Till later when you discover
You no longer have anything.
At all

To recall
That you were once inspired
But aren't any more.

Teeth to edge and hand to heart you beg the bitch.
Kiss her feet. Promise to write.
Promise to be true.
Stop smoking, drinking,
Stop fucking other women
Days

Several
(Hurtful angry shitful low)
days worth more
of staring you down
She relents and returns one line.

Which with
Grateful, beyond words,
you run.

Even if
not even close
To what you had
You get back nothing
More than you deserved

This city is my mistress
I know her so well in the dark
Blindfolded,
She over me
Pressing into her
Til the complete
Emptiness
of release
Begs
in the solitary spaces where nobody but she and I go
For the things I do in her I can tell nobody
For her skin in winter,
Reliably cold and firm beneath my feet
I do not come home
I only am home, in her

So even when she's distant grown
And I'd, retired, banished for another become
Lost in unrequited miscollections
Another anonymity
Some dumb cock
Forced to redrink
My own shabby breath for inspiration
Hers to the last
Is the name
I'll call out.

 

rbb 1-8-2012 all rights reserved
---------------
My latest, written sorta in reverse, pretty much as described above.
Two poems sorta written as one?
Erotic or not? I'm up in the air listening to

Mississippi John Hurt from D.C. Blues - The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 2

Clipped on 7-January-2012, 11:34 PM from I'll Fly Away - YouTube

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from Apostrophe, an excerpt, Zones 6 and 7

As a photographer and son of a sculptor, I've devoted my entire life to "seeing with intent," an act absorbed first at Pop's knee and in all my subsequent studies. It is an engaged process that informs my work and is a link to my departed father. I guess you can say it's in my genes and in my blood. Recently I read this piece at The Erotic Literary Salon which I wrote about four years ago. It is an excerpt from Apostrophe, part of the first chapter, inspired by Ansell Adams' Zone System.  The Zone System demands intense, intimate observation and decisions made by the photographer based on what light reveals and conceals.  But for me, it is more. It is meditation, metaphor and birthright. It is how I express my love for and admiration of the wonders of the female form. Let the words wash over you.

I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me.

Leonard Cohen

Zone 6 Shadows on landscape

In the streets and studios on the campus and the city, desire, age and experience had honed this most talented eye. The photographer takes her in so quickly and discretely that he knows her most intimate details before she knows she’s revealed anything. Most men, heterosexual or not, do this or a form of it but to call his lifelong pursuit “girl-watching” insinuates a certain passive amateurism for this most professional and most practiced of investigators. 

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