Mark Ward: Swordswallower
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Swordswallower
the strongman prepares
to take the vault of the world -
if you breathe you can achieve
anything, a whole new throat
How To Get A Head In Advertising
“I was partying at a club, and I took a Viagra before I went. I met a nurse, who I went home with, who ended up injecting an erection enhancer into my cock. I thought, why not, what could possibly go wrong?” – ‘Gay Man Hospitalised With An Erection That May Never Go Down’, Pink News
Did you need the Viagra to achieve a euphemism -
a woody, a stiffy, at most almost a priapism -
to feel it throb beyond its impression like animism:
the pole ensouled, reanimated into formalism?
The nurse, too used to bodily whims, proffers altruism
as a needle. He smirks. Just ensuring your magnetism.
You wanted its absence to be the cause of nihilism
in all who gazed up at this edifice of hedonism.
But then he cums, no longer interested in organisms
or organs and their -isms. Your cock is a malapropism
that you try to tie down with a loose loop of ribbons;
all night it clings to life and you pray for an exorcism,
divine intervention, to wake up without this barbarism.
Your cock views you as a parasite and in its egotism
wishes for its freedom using shooting pains and schisms.
These poems originally appeared in our ebook The Queer Body.
Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks, Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). He was the Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, and many more, as well as anthologies, the most recent of which is Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman. His poem, ‘Vegas Epithalamion,’ was recorded and broadcast for Irish National Broadcaster RTÉ’s Radio 1 show, Arena. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its third year.
