A COURTESAN'S WHIM
by: Francis Saltus (1846-1889)
- O calm desires
that in my soul increase,
- Delicious boys with poems of blond hair,
- Supple dusk-eyed, whose eager kisses rare
- Are sweet as dew, no longer bring me peace.
-
- I tire of effeminate charm of Greece,
- These Apollonian men with bread breasts bare,
- Superbly statuesque, supremely fair;--
- A God himself would tempt not my desire.
-
- But in vague ways I most insanely yearn
- To meet some lean, dwarfed, fetid, hairy thing
- With loathsome skin and bulging eyes of rheum,
- Then with wild sighs to make the monster burn
- With Love's delight and bid his hot arms cling
- Around my beauty in the perfumed gloom.
"A Courtesan's Whim" is
reprinted from Poetica Erotica. Ed. T.R. Smith. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1921. |
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POEMS BY FRANCIS SALTUS |
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