A wonderful and witty poem from one of my subs.
By Elizabeth Swan on
Swan song (underthings)
My mother warned me against angry swans – they can break a man’s arm, she said. But she never warned me against Mistress Swan, one look from who can break a man’s heart.
Mistress Swan is able
to drink me under the table.
Still I’m parched, insatiate. Spit
from her mouth, piss from her slit,
she pours out the stuff,
I collapse amongst fluff
and calculate the view
along the sightline of her shoe -
a barbican of hose
a ladderless (denier) of ‘no’s.
If liver copes the binge
of my adoring cringe
I’ll extend in chivalry
to 7 years of misery.
The prospect’s black not Isabelline:*
yet I hope for the sublime,
a glimpse of thigh, of skin so white,
but dare not trespass sight
and press my face
against dark lace.
Abject, Mistress Swan’s lickspittle,
I’d crawl a mile at her whistle.
Caught in the web of her toes
mute I lie under her budded rose -
the nub of her sweet rubbered crux
I’ll never – here’s the rub – fuck.
Spit on me, slap me Mistress Swan –
put me down where I belong,
Scared and safe beneath your wings,
where hope nests in feathered things.
* Isabelline – sandy or (very) off-white coloured. The OED has a wonderful anecdote - which it unfortunately refutes - that the word derives from Isabella, archduchess of Austria and daughter of Phillip II of Spain. Phillip laid siege to Ostend in 1601, and Isabella swore not to change her underwear until the siege was successful. The siege lasted until 1604, by which time her underwear was sandy coloured (or worse).
Elizabeth Swan