venus in chains
I recently attended a poetry slam at Michigan State University (hurrah for Logic for winning! You were amazing, once again!) but what I took away from it was the realization that, once again, most people are rather limited when it comes to conceiving of their own erotic worlds, if they think about them at all. This is doubly disappointing since it was a group of poets who were spitting out clichés, and if anyone is going to have fun with language and break some boundaries, I'd hope it would be poets. I don't think that is expecting too much, after all, a delight in language is why we became poets in the first place. And yet calling the embodiment of the erotic up (whatever that happens to be) and claiming it as your own feels a bit … fake. Call me old-fashioned but I want to know that poets earned the right to call upon the Goddess. Show me the scars. I want to know the story of what you gave up that allowed you to know Venus' first name.
Pity poor Venus; wet and nude, again;
who can't still call her? Even our sorry
poets strip her bare. Our erotic, then,
is all bankrupt. There's a price, a very
large price, elsewhere, where the deep erotic
lives. Walk down Rio's Rua Maria
Quitéria, where the saint with the flesh-thick
bunda is worshiped. But don't say bunda;
you have not earned the right. Fork over your
tongue and your right hand. The sacred always
demands flesh. Then you can talk of amour;
how you've never betrayed Venus' gaze
or name, her wit or flame; all her spirit.
How you, who've tasted love, honored it.
Note on the etymology of Bunda:
There is some debate over whether words like bunda, from Brazilian Portuguese, and bounda, from Haitian Creole, are in fact related to contemporary American slang's use of the word booty. As a translator, both bunda and bounda clearly mean "buttocks" or "rear." They are words that originated from the slave diaspora of West Africa (though my knowledge of Yoruba is vague so I will not try to say which language branch they come from) and yet almost all on-line dictionaries I've consulted claim the word "booty" as a U.S. Southern corruption of the word "body." I don't know whether this is true or not. I just find the whole thing curious.