The One In Ten

The evolution of a girl's sexuality from a very young age, tending all the way up until adolescence - seeing as I cannot account for any further. And then, Eve and Eden and female condemnation.

"I have seen the best of you, and I have seen the worst of you, and I choose both."

At six

The hot-jam paste of six, 

The German sechs,

The time of the fattened horned mammal 

The faded companion swells the breadth

To an army of men.

Men, with their sculpted knees,

The nails left like rat waste

Onto the floor of Auschwitz.

Men, boys, raised by wolves,

An untameable, messy breed

For my umber-tinted

Glazed to perfect, darling little mind.

For the four

Beside the vow of succession,

Into the deride of haste:

The fleshed-out Golden Gate

Sloped between the athlete's marker,

Grows sodden in the back garden,

The vegetable stickler combusts with

The daring laser attacking like

An alive toad in a Luna effort,

The gut of insects 

Within their quiet soothe. 

At the very top of the clock,

The clock-stop, c**k-block

(So they say), the fear kicks in 

Like a boiled honey Werther's

Antsing like a rank thing,

Waking the want, 

Making the tumultuous override,

The blood-spew, feminine stew,

The heel of Fate kicked into the spine

And the Apollo of your vision

Becomes a Wide Pertain,

Fishing out the lice 

From your belt-buckle teeth.

Three-hundred-and-sixty-five,

The hours move a lot slower when

You're not gold enough for them to wait

To flamboy in you. You are not riches enough

With the holes in your gritty, grey skin

The way you sink, floundering, blacked out

In maize -- the real yell

Of masculine burst 

Breaks into you like a seed.

Wondering like an apple in fall,

The balloon of beauty

Crevasses into the manhunt 

I've made of men, the one-in-ten.

Sixteen, the door-man calls

An undercurrent to the door,

The violent passion of the idle succumb.

The realism drifts like rocks wedged

Into the dry-sand of the human abyss.

Some of the days are good.

Like fine, rich wine

Contemplating the heady shade of 

The Morning Star's reborn, the red on red,

Of the dead, dead. Some of the days

Spark s**t, as if the soil ruin we should

Be accustomed to by now and by large. 

Maybe this is Eve's want.

I am tempted by the lore of men

For the sake of one woman's cotton frame,

The wine stales it's sales and the blood rips

Through the open-wound of my lips.

The undeniable potential, the blessed of this

Majestic blue mist of dreams, is the Man,

So fit-to-burst, no accommodation for the like of trust,

Let the serpent lie because He had enough venom

For the shaking of his sins,

And the woman let the reptile

Curl into a swirl on her breast,

And bitten into misfortune, 

For the areola uproar of her titan woes,

The dream peels like an unhappening fruit

Of reality, the deep suppress 

For the eye of God. 

Reviews

[Simran Kewlani]

I did not understand the concept of this poem. Could you explain it to me please?

[Amorette Duvannes]

Sure! I hope you don't mind my explaining this to you step-by-step. It's not a condescension thing, I just don't know any other way as to how I can break it down.

Basically, each stanza represents a different age, or time in a young female's life. The poem, in itself, is about female sexual awakening at different stages.

The first stanza is at the time of a young girl being six years old, and considering the possibility comparing her disinterest of her "horned mammal" - a unicorn, representative of imaginary creatures for companionship - with a new fangled interest of boys, or rather, the male form. This stanza has her contemplating the difference between a male body and a female one - the first stage in her sexual awakening.

The second stanza "for the four", starts up again four years later. So, when the girl is ten. At first it talks about the girls hasty and impatient desire to grow up and become a woman - and the middle through to the end of this stanza is about how she know recognises the difference in her own body, and that of a male, and the utilities and functions that is specific to one sex and not the other. This is usually the age children start having sex education lessons, so this stanza enforces this idea with her being able to derive her own genitalia from a man's.

The third stanza, "at the top of the clock", represents her being twelve years old - what with the clock hand being pointed at the number twelve when it's at the top, and whatnot. First, it talks about the fear of womanhood, and adulthood, and growing-up in general. This fear is supposed to be fear born out of the feelings she is starting to experience for the first time - lust. The stanza then talks about the "blood stew, feminine stew", which is, of course, periods and menstruation and all that great stuff that happens during puberty. The "apollo of your vision" is imagery used to represent boys and men and general romantic interests, and the "Wide Pertain" is the way in which girls of that age lust after boys, when they don't know what they're feeling as it has never happened before. How this process is approached and conducted, and therefore, what the acquirement of these feelings leaves you without -- innocence.

The fourth stanza starts "three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days" after the third one -- so the girl is now thirteen, now a teenager, which is obviously always going to be a big thing for teenage girls. It basically talks about how time is going so slow, and how the girl is having all of these very intense and very lustful feelings, but can not act on them or act in the ways she thinks are sexy or romantic because she is not old enough to. It then starts to talk about acne, and more good puberty stuff, and basically contemplates the idea of: what is the point in having all these feelings when we are still too young, and how our youth is physically obvious (due to acne and periods and more), but how we can be mentally mature and emotionally mature enough enough to be very sexually aware of ourselves, and in a more broad sense, of how the amount of years we've been alive and the way our bodies conduct themselves do not necessarily define how mature or immature we are. The stanza also, most importantly, talks about how she is starting to build up dreams and fantasies of men, and although she knows that the image she is projecting is not likely, because a man like that is "one-in-ten", she is thinking them anyway because they bring her comfort and solace.

The fifth stanza jumps to the girl being sixteen - a very fragile age, but still, she is starting to have more freedom and independence. It basically talks about how, at a young age, it was fine to have dreams and fantasies of men, because you are young! And that is what children do, and it can bring no harm! But at sixteen, at an age people are starting to regard you as mature and able for the adult world, is it really logical and is it really mature to project these romantic visionaries onto men, or would it be a more grown-up thing to do, to face the reality of men - in a more general, broad sense. Then it talks about how some days and good, and some are bad -- meaning, sometimes she can see the truth clearly, and sometimes, she needs this fantasy to escape into, because the real world is too painful and brash and the whole fantasy of her Prince Charming / Mr Darcy or whatever is a comfort. So even though she is trying really hard to be grown-up, she still has these childish ideals that she can't get rid of, because it feels like her dreams are the only things she has. Then, at the end of the stanza, it starts to talk about Eve.

Basically, the rest of the poem, from the end of the fifth stanza, onwards, is about the condemnation of Eve. She ate the apple and now, for all of eternity, women are considered weaker because she was the one to succumb and Adam was the strong, muscley one who did everything right except be cursed to be in the presence of a woman. So, my poem contemplates two things: the first being, if this idea is true and Eve is to blame, maybe her punishment are these dreams. That woman are romantic and men want physical sex and that women will never be satisfied because their dreams will never be fulfilled because men can't love them emotionally, but men are A-OK because women will have sex with them because you can have sex without love, but (and this is broadly, stereotypically and generally speaking), you can't have love without sex, which, if you want a feminist reading on it, you could decode as being: you can have the power of men without women, but you can't have the power of women without men to subsidise that. If you want the gender-roles reading and want to push this entire poem that way (because you can, although it's not what I intended myself), then you can.

The second reading in the Adam-and-Eve instalment of my poem, is that perhaps Eve did nothing wrong. Perhaps Eve gave in to the serpent and ate the fruit because it was a kindly thing to do and she wanted to help the snake and be kind to it and make it feel good, and the only reason Adam wasn't the one to eat the fruit was because he was too evil and he saw the evil in the serpent and matched it with his own, and in this right, the only thing Eve (and WOMEN) are guilty of, is truth, and love, and emotion. And all the men get let off scot-free because they are evil and cold and they can rival evil because they have more of it in them, but women are good.

That was basically my summation of my poem, but you can read it whatever way you want, and I know it comes out as being a little preachy and that is seems very man-hating, but it was never intended to be that way and for the purposes of art, I'll let it stick because I think it's quite relevant and has something to offer. (Also, I don't hate men and think that they're all stone-cold evil.)

Thank you for asking. :)

[Simran Kewlani]

Thank you and you're most welcome. Your thoughts are really deep. Keep writing. :)