Sensual Poetry Quotes

lean in to kiss me in all the places where the ache is the most special.

Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess When did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

Now come the whispers bearing bouquets of moonbeams and sunlight tremblings.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites; Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from; The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.

The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, 'I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.

Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

We thought everything would be forgotten, but I still remember your claws running down my back. I wonder if you still think about us, the way I do. How our legs would crash into each other in the middle of the night, and how we ended up creating the moon in the confines of our beds.

Hands. Cheeks. Eyes. Lips. Neck. Ears. Thighs. Heart. Soul. Ahh! the things I get to savor you with.

Επιθυμίες Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό, με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά -- έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό." Desires "Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum, with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet -- this is what desires resemble that have passed without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Ithaka As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as the image of my father, whose life was spent like this, thinking of death, to the exclusion of other sensual matters, so in the end that life was easy to give up, since it contained nothing: even my mother's voice couldn't make him change or turn back as he believed that once you can't love another human being you have no place in the world.

Ô, Muse of the Heart’s Passion, let me relive my Love’s memory, to remember her body, so brave and so free, and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me, and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me, Ô, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy!

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior. The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor. Any peasant can tell you that. Beware of emotions. Any child can tell you that. Watch out for the emotional person. He is a lurching lunatic. Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. Emotions are addictive and narcotic and stupefacient. Do not trust anyone who comes on emotional. What are the emotions? In a book entitled Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, written when I was a psychologist, I presented classifications of emotions and detailed descriptions of their moderate and extreme manifestations. Emotions are all based on fear. [...] The emotional person cannot think; he cannot perform any effective game action (except in acts of physical aggression and strength). The emotional person is turned off sensually. His body is a churning robot. [...] The only state in which we can learn, harmonize, grow, merge, join, understand is the absence of emotion. This is called bliss or ecstasy, attained through centering the emotions. [...] Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy. Love cannot exist in an emotional state. [...] The great kick of the mystic experience, the exultant, ecstatic hit, is the sudden relief from emotional pressure. Did you imagine that there could be emotions in heaven? Emotions are closely tied to ego games. Check your emotions at the door to paradise.

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. "You do not know what you are missing by your micro-scopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art . . . We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

Her veins flowed with liquid poetry. I stole the words from her mouth with my kisses.

The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

Your inner thighs like the petals of a newly opened lily Long, smooth and sensually captivating Drawing me into the center of the flower

To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery.

She is a living, breathing work of art. As audacious as Dali's mustache, mysterious like a Mona Lisa smile. As sensual as O'Keeffe's painted petals, glorious, like a Van Gogh starry night.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent. When she came to my bed and begged me with sighs not to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, I told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise. While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fine I devoured her mouth, tender lips divine; and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine. Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

When she bites my lips, I see stars dancing right next to the sun.

To delight the ear and the eye is a mere sensual indulgence;—true poetry strikes at the soul.

She was remembering His gaze, those deep pools of blue, crystalline in nature, peering deep into her soul. She remembered the first night she had looked into that darkness – no, into that light in his eyes – they were level and straight, kind and compassionate, without any ado, Her hands in His, offerings of comfort and concern for Her station, the concern she felt for those close to Her, each to their own heaven or hell, and the law of attraction began to build.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

You hold me like a favored book Pressing my spine with your fingers Leafing through my pages Anticipating each phrase You rest me on your knee As you ponder their meaning Feeling me weave Lyrically through your soul And when you return to me You devour me from cover to cover

Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed. Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction. Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page? Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things. Play with syntax. Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will. Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong. If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time). Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: One. Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

Here, illuminated at last, Nestles the ruddy glint of spiritual certainty; Sweet moments of passion and healing, Of sensual release.

It’s your bones against mine. The slight curve in your spine and it’s Sunday: I don’t have to think about suicide.

But the way he was kissing me was anything but childish, far from it. It was sensual, passionate… incredible.

Vanda (as Dunayev): I am a pagan. I am a Greek. I love the ancients not for their pediments or their poetry, but becausein their world Venus could love Paris one day and Anchises the next. Because they're not the moderns, who live in their mind, and because they're the opposite of Christians, who live on a cross. I don't live in my mind, or on a cross. I live on this divan. In this dress. In these stockings and these shoes. I want to live the way Helen and Aspasia lived, not the twisted women of today, who are never happy and never give happiness. Who won't admit that they want love without limit. Why should I forgo any possible pleasure, abstain from any sensual experience? I'm young, I'm rich, and I'm beautiful and I shall make the most of that. I shall deny myself nothing. Thomas (as Kushemski): I certainly respect your devotion to principle. Vanda (as Dunayev): I don't need your respect, excuse me. I'll take happiness. My happiness, not society's happiness. I will love a man who pleases me, and please a man who makes me happy--but only as long as he makes me happy, not a moment longer.

Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.

Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression.

The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.

say بسمالله before you eat me

heaven and earth embrace and entwine wander through valleys and undulating lands let us explore uncover every corner vulnerable nevermore let us marvel at the wonder that we are

My only intention is, That one day, You see my sincerity, Hear my affection, Feel my sensuality, And remember my truths.

What you call poetry and passion are nothing but lies—with beautiful facades. Out of your hundred poets, ninety-nine are not really poets but only people in a state of turmoil, emotion, passion, heat, lust, sexuality, sensuality. Only one out of your hundred poets is a real poet. And the real poet may never compose any poetry, because his whole being is poetry. The way he walks, the way he sits, the way he eats, the way he sleeps—it is all poetry. He exists as poetry. He may create poetry, he may not create poetry, that is irrelevant. But what you call poetry is nothing but the expression of your fever, of your heated state of consciousness. It is a state of insanity. Passion is insane, blind, unconscious—because it gives you the feeling as if it is love. Love

The Soul is Spirit embodied. The Soul is mystery, enchantment, and poetry incarnate – it is earthy, sensual, ecstatic, and rooted in the here-and-now. The Soul is primarily yin (feminine), while Spirit is primarily yang (masculine).

Lollipops and raindrops Sunflowers and sun-kissed daisies Rolling surf and raging sea Sailing ships and submarines Old Glory and “purple mountain’s majesty” Screaming guitar and lilting rhyme Flight of fancy and high-steppin’ dances Set free my mind to wander… Imagine the ant’s marching journeys. Fly, in my mind’s eye, on butterfly wings. Roam the distant depths of space. Unfurl tall sails and cross the ocean. Pictures made just to enthrall Creating images from my truth Painting hopes and dreams on my canvas Capturing, through my lens, the ephemeral Let me ruminate ‘pon sensual darkness… Tremble o’er Hollywood’s fluttering Gothics… Ride the edge of my seat with the hero… Weep with the heroine’s desperation. Yet… more than all these things… Give me words spun out masterfully… Terms set out in meter and rhyme… Phrases bent to rattle the soul… Prose that always miraculously inspires me! The trill runs up my spine, as I recall… A touch… a caress…a whispered kiss… Ebony eyes embracing my soul… Two souls united in beat of hearts. A butterfly flutter in my womb My lover’s wonder o’er my swelling The testament of our love given life Newly laid in my lover’s arms Luminous, sweet ebony eyes Just so much like his father’s A gaze of wonder and contentment From my babe at mother’s breast Words of the Divine set down for me Faith, Hope, Love, and Charity Grace, Mercy, and undeserved Salvation “My Shepherd will supply my need” These are the things that inspire me.

Zorro also is part of the bandido tradition, most closely associated with the possibly mythical Joaquin Murrieta and the historical Tiburcio Vasquez. As well as these local California legendary figures, Zorro is an American version of Robin Hood and similar heroes whose stories blend fiction and history, thus moving Zorro into the timeless realm of legend. The original story takes place in the Romantic era, but, more important, Zorro as Diego adds an element of poetry and sensuality, and as Zorro the element of sexuality, to the traditional Western hero. Not all Western heroes are, as D. H. Lawrence said of Cooper's Deerslayer, "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," but in the Western genre the hero and villain more often than not share these characteristics. What distinguishes Zorro is a gallantry, a code of ethics, a romantic sensibility, and most significant, a command of language and a keen intelligence and wit.

At the break of dawn I wake up mesmerized to the vision of you walking towards me Fresh out of the shower shirtless, with wet hair and in your unbuttoned jeans I ache for a kiss as I put away the cigarette hanging loosely on your lips And in the moment when your lips touch mine I realize there is no way I am making it out of these sheets or Paris

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain. Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all other trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, ‘Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did now want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. [..] She wanted to merge with him. [..] 'It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,’ she would say, 'it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.’ In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.

Such richness flowing through the branches of summer and into the body, carried inward on the five rivers! Disorder and astonishment rattle your thoughts and your heart cries for rest but don’t succumb, there’s nothing so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy is a taste before it’s anything else, and the body can lounge for hours devouring the important moments. Listen, the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it into the body first, like small wild plums.

This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he's also making one of his sly jokes: he's created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry's strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet's breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer's disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words.

Don’t be afraid to get high. Take the chance whenever it presents itself and get high on passion, on poetry, music, and art. Get drunk on nature, on silence, on the sunrise and sunset, on sensuality and sex. Get lit on the moon and lost in the stars. Sip with equal ardor the divine and the mundane alike. Let your inhibitions go. Drop the defenses. Live in the moment, with no motes to cross and no walls to scale before you can allow yourself to become lost - lost in your senses, in your heart, in the world, in your mind. If you want to make the most of this life, you have to feel it fully, to inhale it deeply, to drink with abandon. You can’t be afraid to get high.

he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it

On one level, the poems after Verlaine in this new book are a selfish project. I wanted to try on a voice with which, despite sharing some stylistic and tonal sympathies, I seemed to have little in common. It served as a psychodramatic exercise, a walk in somebody else’s shoes. Writing each new poem while drawing on the raw material of Verlaine in translation has led me, in the always dramatised context of the individual poem, to think and say things I’d likely never have dreamed of otherwise. But just as importantly, I hope these poems paint a fresh portrait of Paul Verlaine, however partial and sketchy, that reveals him to be a more surprising, hard-thinking, and even revivifying poet than expected. Beyond his skilled conjuring of delicate and atmospheric allusiveness, at its best, his is also poetry of punchy musicality, philosophical edge, and candidness – both intellectual and emotional – which allows for genuine beauty, sensuality, and sadness.

So often have I studied the views of Florence, that I was familiar with the city before I ever set foot within its walls; I found that I could thread my way through the streets without a guide. Turning to the left I passed before a bookseller's shop, where I bought a couple of descriptive surveys of the city (guide). Twice only was I forced to inquire my way of passers by, who answered me with politeness which was wholly French and with a most singular accent; and at last I found myself before the facade of Santa Croce. Within, upon the right of the doorway, rises the tomb of Michelangelo; lo! There stands Canova's effigy of Alfieri; I needed no cicerone to recognise the features of the great Italian writer. Further still, I discovered the tomb of Machiavelli; while facing Michelangelo lies Galileo. What a race of men! And to these already named, Tuscany might further add Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. What a fantastic gathering! The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious awe. The mystic dimness which filled the church, its plain, timbered roof, its unfinished facade – all these things spoke volumes to my soul. Ah! Could I but forget...! A Friar moved silently towards me; and I, in the place of that sense of revulsion all but bordering on physical horror which usually possesses me in such circumstances, discovered in my heart a feeling which was almost friendship. Was not he likewise a Friar, Fra Bartolomeo di San Marco, that great painter who invented the art of chiaroscuro, and showed it to Raphael, and was the forefather of Correggio? I spoke to my tonsured acquaintance, and found in him an exquisite degree of politeness. Indeed, he was delighted to meet a Frenchman. I begged him to unlock for me the chapel in the north-east corner of the church, where are preserved the frescoes of Volterrano. He introduced me to the place, then left me to my own devices. There, seated upon the step of a folds tool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling, I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano's Sybills, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter's art. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitations of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. I sat down on one of the benches which line the piazza di Santa Croce; in my wallet, I discovered the following lines by Ugo Foscolo, which I re-read now with a great surge of pleasure; I could find no fault with such poetry; I desperately needed to hear the voice of a friend who shared my own emotion (…)

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

Like drops of water that fall on the rocks of the jungle, the silence is full of tenderness. Whisper softly my poetry unraveling your admiration. In the name of night. Everything I see is simplicity in your beautiful body Like an incandescent light that dispels the darkness Then it bounced on the rose petals in the dim moonlight. Blushing reconciles the anxiety of the soul Comforting a sore heart Your beauty is a flower that unites to dazzle the majesty of the universe. Ahhh love... Your beauty is like a waterfall from the height of a cliff that is so sensual, showing the magic of a perfect panorama. How seductive and alluring is your soft skin..... As gentle as the twilight wind blew the dandelions scattered under the night sky. As soft as a lump of cotton that lay white on the heart rug. As gentle as the caress of the night breeze, flaking your shiny black hair. Ahhh. Let my breath rest for a moment Here, Between two seas of wine flowing red I find on your lips. How beautiful is love When the stalks of a kiss fall lying down Tickling spoiled and whispering intimately about the love that is heaven behind your ear with a warm whisper blowing slowly And Slowly... caressing your face in a long soft moan Lull a thousand touches and then cast your body into a pleasure that you have not found. In the name of my chest. Let our restless tantrums grapple in the flames of burning love. Until our passion quells the passion, Wet and subside. ️

I [...] suggest considering Byron as a Scottish poet – I say ’Scottish’, not ’Scots’, since he wrote in English. The one poet of his time with whom he could be considered to be in competition, a poet of whom he spoke invariably with the highest respect, was Sir Walter Scott. I have always seen, or imagined that I saw, in busts of the two poets, a certain resemblance in the shape of the head. The comparison does honour to Byron, and when you examine the two faces, there is no further resemblance. Were one a person who liked to have busts about, a bust of Scott would be something one could live with. There is an air of nobility about that head, an air of magnanimity, and of that inner and perhaps unconscious serenity that belongs to great writers who are also great men. But Byron – that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression, and worst of all that blind look of the self-conscious beauty; the bust of Byron is that of a man who was every inch the touring tragedian. Yet it was by being so thoroughgoing an actor that Byron arrived at a kind of knowledge: of the world outside, which he had to learn something about in order to play his role in it, and of that part of himself which was his role. Superficial knowledge, of course: but accurate so far as it went. Of a Scottish quality in Byron’s poetry, I shall speak when I come to Don Juan. But there is a very important part of the Byronic make-up which may appropriately be mentioned before considering his poetry, for which I think his Scottish antecedence provided the material. That is his peculiar diabolism, his delight in posing as a damned creature – and in providing evidence for his damnation in a rather horrifying way. Now, the diabolism of Byron is very different from anything that the Romantic Agony (as Mr Praz calls it) produced in Catholic countries. And I do not think it is easily derived from the comfortable compromise between Christianity and paganism arrived at in England and characteristically English. It could come only from the religious background of a people steeped in Calvinistic theology.

The sensual and spiritual are the same energy playing at different speeds, like poetry and dance" Alla Bozarth Campbell.

Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted 'Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!'; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. 'It's not sensual pleasure I'm after,' she would say, 'it's happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.' In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was a room for her only on the rug.

If words fail, let sensuality talk.

Lorel once told me that fate is a poet, organizing beauty out of chaos. I believed that for a long time—that life happens to a person, buoying them along on its tide whichever way it pleases, instead of bending and shaping itself around my will. And even now I’m not sure that I can entirely discard the idea, because God knows my life has spiraled into gothic prose, and even in the depths of my insanity I could not have thought up the repeating rhythms of horrible motif. Blood as oil, oil as sacred chrism, the suffocating paradox of its sacred and sensual nature, and can oil really run in a person’s blood? Because when I think of one, I think of the other—they are inseparable in my mind. When I think of the times I dipped my fingers in green-gold oil, memory calls forth the image of blood on a warehouse floor, and blood mixed with oil in the creases of my hands.

Eros is not merely a demoniac power who creates chaos and destruction, locking the whole of life in binding fetters. In all ages, this same power has been a source of irresistible energy. The love of man and woman, which God has placed in the heart of mankind as one of the mightiest aids to the maintenance of the species, is also one of the greatest inspirations of human culture. This is the force which sets heroism aflame and inspires artists; it urges men to achievements which they never would dream of attempting in their sober senses. Where would the divine spark of poetry be, or the sweet harmony of our composers, not the mention the deep feeling which moves us to much in the old folk songs, but for this inner urge which can turn any stripling into a poet? All the great creative artists mankind has produced were sensitive, not to say sensual, individuals, and we should bring a sympathetic understanding to bear upon their failings if now and then they overstep the bounds, not only of narrow conventions, but even of the accepted moral code. . . . Certainly the natural Eros is capable of anything -- of noble deeds or of abysmal follies, of highest self-sacrifice or senseless destruction. But does this entitle us to condemn the intensity of the fire which can cook a meal or bake a potter's masterpiece and, on the other hand, is also capable of burning down an entire city, sweeping away countless works of art in its destructive course? Man tries by every art to harness destructive forces and employ them constructively for his own convenience and profit. It is equally morality's task to use the mighty power of this primitive urge to the highest ends, but no part of the true morality's function either to malign or condemn the sexual instinct.

In this same contemporary world of ours there remains the indestructible (for otherwise human nature itself would have to be destroyed) gift innate in all men which impels them now and again to escape from the restricted sphere where they labor for their necessities and provide for their security—to escape not by mere forgetting, but by undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality. Now, as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrance to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man's destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life. Now, as always, the philosophical mind will react with awe to the mystery of being revealed in a grain of matter or a human face.

Oh Darling, Death is the best lover; it waits for you silently and forever. Sometimes that forever is mere seconds and other times it is decades, yet it will wait for you and welcome you with its arms spread. It doesn’t discriminate between rich-poor, sinners-saints; it loves them all equally hauntingly.

Less poetry,” said the voice over the telephone. “Be specific.” But did anyone ever experience pleasure from reading a clinical description? Didn’t the old man know how words carry colours and sounds into the flesh?

Her heart throbbed wildly as he plunged passionately between her clenched thighs. Moist heat setting their bodies on fire. He moved deeply inside her... into the pits of her wanton world. Fighting her demons. Burning everything down except that place where only they exist, where he possess, consumes, devours her -- entirely. It's pain - insane. It's pleasure - intense. Another darkness. Another madness. Black Hearts

My wine Don’t sip like birds pecking at dust; plunge into it, sup it, soak in it, revel in its sensual nature. (Savour this succulence.) Succulent satisfaction.

I read a poem today that reminded me of you.” He gave her another sideways glance, as if confessing something naughty. “Would you like to hear it?” Her knees quivered beneath her skirts. Perhaps he did feel something for her. Perhaps he is now going to declare himself! “Yes, I would.” “Your chaperone is watching us from the parapets. It would be better for me to recite it more privately.” With gentle force, he guided her behind a tall hedge. Lydia’s belly fluttered as Deveril took both her hands. His hair gleamed like an angel’s wing. Would he tell her he couldn’t let her go, that they didn’t have to go to London? That instead they could remain here…together? “She walks in beauty, like the night,” he whispered. “Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.” Vincent’s eyes were like a turbulent sea in a moonlit storm. He gazed at her as though she was something precious. Lydia sighed as his long fingers removed a pin from her hair. “One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress,” Her breath caught as he twirled a lock of her hair. “Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express, How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.” His hand crept up to caress her cheek, his intent gaze never wavering. “And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow,” His lips curved in a sensual smile as he concluded. “But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!” For an eternity, they stared as if peering into each other’s souls. His fingers slid past her cheek and threaded once more through her hair, sending the remaining pins scattering into the grass. “Lydia,” he whispered. Then his lips were on hers, warm, silken, teasing. Her limbs melted. Intoxicating heat unfurled low in her body. Lydia reached up to pull him closer, to demand more. Vincent pulled back before she could grasp him. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “And that is your most important lesson in courtship, Lydia. Never allow a man to get you off alone, especially if he desires to recite poetry, and particularly Lord Byron’s verses.” A strangled gasp caught in her throat at his duplicity. It had all been part of the game! “You…you…” He held up a hand. “Now slap me with your fan in retaliation for taking such liberties.” Reeling in outrage, she fumbled in the pockets of her cloak for the ineffectual weapon. Vincent shrugged, undaunted at her ire. “That is why you should keep your fan at the ready.” Seizing the bundle of cloth-covered sticks, she smacked him soundly on the arm, much harder than Miss Hobson had instructed. “You are lucky I did not have my gun,” she hissed. How could he? To

She is wild love and eternal fire - A sensual blend of soft heart and burning desire. Yes, an acquired taste, but the truth is once you fall in love with her, you'll never recover. Her love will seep into your veins, you'll never be the same.

Lucien saw all heads turn curiously toward the entrance; then his jaw dropped as a graceful beauty in white walked in, her chin high, a strand of pearls draped artfully over her strawberry-blond hair. 'Alice!' He stared, flabbergasted, transfixed. 'What the hell is she doing here?' He couldn't believe his eyes. Joy and panic crashed in on him from opposite directions. Oh, God, how he had missed her. 'What the hell is she doing in London?' Caro sidled into the ballroom beside her. The baroness was dressed in a tight black velvet dress, but Alice commanded the room, poised, slender, and cool. With her airy evening gown of white silk wafting sensually against her skin, she was an aloof marble goddess who had just stepped down to life from atop her pedestal. She seemed an entirely different creature than the serious, shy young thing who had ventured into his library last week and had been so easily charmed by a bit of Donne poetry. Now she was a force to be reckoned with.

Love has three dimensions. One is animal-like; it is only lust, a physical phenomenon. The other is manlike; it is higher than lust, than sexuality, than sensuality. It is not just exploitation of the other as a means. The first is only an exploitation; the other is used as a means in the first. In the second the other is not used as a means, the other is equal to you. The other is as much an end unto herself or himself as you are, and love is not an exploitation but a mutual sharing of your being, of your joys, of your music, of your pure poetry of life. It is sharing and mutual. The first is possessive, the second is nonpossessive. The first creates a bondage, the second gives freedom. And the third dimension of love is godly, godlike: when there is no object to love, when love is not a relationship at all, when love becomes a state of your being. You are simply loving—not in love with somebody in particular, but simply a state of love, so whatsoever you do, you do it lovingly; whomsoever you meet, you meet lovingly. Even if you touch a rock, you touch the rock as if you are touching your beloved; even if you look at the trees, your eyes are full of love. The first uses the other as a means; in the second, the other is no longer a means; in the third the other has completely disappeared. The first creates bondage, the second gives freedom, the third goes beyond both; it is transcendence of all duality. There is no lover and no beloved, there is only love. That’s the ultimate state of love, and that’s the goal of life to be attained. The majority of people remain confined to the first. Only very rare people enter into the second, and rarest is the phenomenon I am calling the third. Only a Buddha, a Jesus . . . There are a few people here and there, they can be counted on one’s fingers, who have entered the third dimension of love. But if you keep your eyes fixed on the faraway star, it is possible. And when it becomes possible, you are fulfilled. Then life lacks nothing, and in that fulfillment is joy, eternal joy. Even death cannot destroy it.

This journey into the Cosmic Womb can be felt as an inner death; falling into the abyss, the Void, with no known way to come back out. Surrendering into this perceived individual death and trusting the process opens the heart and Womb back to the great web of life. The initiation comes from emerging at the otherside, forever changed, neither here nor there but fully present, able to enjoy and give the wisdom, gifts, and fruits of all worlds, while fully grounded and born back into this world, middleworld, as an innocent, sensual, wise being. In Celtic lore this journey into the Cosmic Womb is encoded in the story of Arianrhod and her spinning tower. “Arianrhod’s tower is also called Caer Sidi, the Glass Castle or Spiral Tower and is traditionally the place wherein lore keepers serve their apprenticeship. The terms are strict and it is thought of as an imprisonment. Taliesin says he spent three periods in the prison of Arianrhod, learning his trade as seer and poet—the art of seeing clearly (clairvoyance) and the art of telling well so his audience could learn too (poetry); two basic skills for the shaman.

bet ya think i’m forbidden huh but i’m not riba i just wanna interest ya

My Lady, this desire is no crime, To see you undress, untouched, unspoiled, Woman your beauty is mesmerizing, My trespassing eyes hypnotized, As all my lust turns into ashes in your honour, And the gravity getting heavy by your mere sight, For I bathe in thy magnificent glory, As you reveal inch by inch, Of what God took seven days to make, And I shall forfeit the seven heavens, To possess what lays beneath your beautiful breast, And lay to rest in those jade green eyes, With your heart inside mine, As the stars slide down your hair into my eyes. So undress beneath the interstellar lights, For none shall see but just my eyes, And none shall feel but just my heart, So hide no more in your coyness, For you are an artwork supreme, My Lady, this desire is no crime, To watch you undress, untouched, unspoiled… --- My Lady This Desire Is No Crime

On one level, the poems after Verlaine in this collection are a selfish project. I wanted to try on a voice with which, despite sharing some stylistic and tonal sympathies, I seemed to have little in common. It served as a psychodramatic exercise, a walk in somebody else’s shoes. Writing each new poem while drawing on the raw material of Verlaine in translation has led me, in the always dramatised context of the individual poem, to think and say things I’d likely never have dreamed of otherwise. But just as importantly, I hope these poems paint a fresh portrait of Paul Verlaine, however partial and sketchy, that reveals him to be a more surprising, hard-thinking, and even revivifying poet than expected. Beyond his skilled conjuring of delicate and atmospheric allusiveness, at its best, his is also poetry of punchy musicality, philosophical edge, and candidness – both intellectual and emotional – which allows for genuine beauty, sensuality, and sadness.

Nietzsche was attuned to the vitality of sensuality, myth, and art. Music, poetry, and even the mad laughter of the trickster Dionysus, who he championed, offer an aesthetic life of pleasure. They are pursuits through which humans can overcome their limits and the tragic condition of life: 'Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Thus, although his rhetoric and his working style demanded the strictest observance of what the world presented to him, he did not see innocently. “His pleasure came less,” Gertrude Himmelfarb argues, “from the passive, sensual act of seeing than from the effort of comprehending and analyzing.”13 He could not, he admits, “resist forming [an hypothesis] on every subject” (Autobiography, 141). Himmelfarb errs here only in that “the sensual act of seeing,” if not often passive, was intensely pleasurable for Darwin, as passage after passage of The Voyage of the Beagle and even of the Origin make plain. The sensual pleasure was enwound with the intellectual pleasure of the hypothesis. Direct engagement with the natural world—the exotic tropics and spiders at sea and the weeds in his garden—carried him through his virtually lifelong painful illness and beyond his loss of feeling for the poetry that had inspired and taught him in his early Beagle years. “The

He wanted painting to be perceived as the most seductive of the arts, more intelligent, sensual, charming, and true to life than poetry, music, or sculpture. 6 In order to achieve this, he wanted to make his figures animated and give them a soul. It must look as though they could twist and turn their bodies as naturally and nimbly as a weasel, and bite back at the world outside the frame surrounding them.

Waiting to create sensual art with your fingers as brushstrokes and my body your blank canvas.

The true poet is of the hero type, soaring above sensual gratification and rational formulas. The language of poetry has the potential for generating cosmic visions and the optimism of a regenerative belief system.

THE MULADHARA PERSONALITY Someone ruled by the Muladhara chakra is often confronted with life lessons about security—or rather, the desire to be physically and financially secure. The behavior of these people is often compared to that of ants, which ardently work for their queen. Their sense of self is often based on gaining approval or following the laws. Thus, for these people, their lessons are often about confronting and freeing themselves from greed, lust, sensuality, and anger. Like the earth element, Muladhara personalities are physically strong and productive. They often win competitively because of their drive and strength. THE SVADHISTHANA PERSONALITY A Svadhisthana individual is most likely devoted to the higher things in life—art, music, poetry, and the jewels of creativity. While beautiful, this lushness also presents temptation away from the spiritual path, with the major diversions involving sexuality, sensuality, and indulgence. A second-chakra person is likely to experience mood swings or emotional inconsistency. Desire is rooted in the second chakra, and can lead to love and the enjoyment of pleasures, but also to frivolity or just plain selfishness. The Svadhisthana path is often called the way of the butterfly, for life is full of so many joys, it can be hard to remain in one place for long. It is important to develop discipline to balance the compulsion to experience. THE MANIPURA PERSONALITY This chakra embraces the planes of karma (the past), dharma (one’s purpose), and the celestial plane. Its focus is to atone for one’s past errors. Manipura is the fire chakra, and people who dwell here tend to be fiery; the key to joy lies in the application of the heat. Is it used to avoid the past—or to work toward a positive future? Third-chakra people tend to be temperamental but are also able to commit to their goals. They are often driven by the need to be recognized and to succeed. The chief issue to confront is ego. By confronting issues of pride and control, the Manipura person is able to embrace the best features of its major animal, the ram. The ram can walk nimbly into the highest of mountaintops; so can the third-chakra individual. THE ANAHATA PERSONALITY When the lotus unfolds, the twelve petals invite the movement of energy in twelve directions. This activates twelve mental capabilities: hope, anxiety, endeavor, possessiveness, arrogance, incompetence, discrimination, egoism, lustfulness, fraudulence, indecision, and repentance (as described in the Mahanirvana Tantra, a detailing of Tantric rituals and practices, edited for Western audiences by Arthur Avalon (pen name of Sir John Woodroffe) in 1913).25 Twelve divinities in the form of sound assist with the process involved in confronting, dealing with, and healing one’s way through these twelve qualities. A heart-based person might find him- or herself greatly challenged by the so-called negative qualities that stir in the heart. However,

un ras bharii aa.nkho.n me.n hayaa khel rahii hai do zahr ke pyaalo.n me.n qazaa khel rahii haiThe poet says that there is a strange mixture of shyness and sensuality in the eyes of the beloved. This mixture confuses the lover so much that he can neither express his desire nor suppress it. Therefore, her eyes are like two poison cups causing lover’s death.