[Shelled Shells] a poem

A dry & decent life is underrated,
patchwork quilts of one-size-fits-all,
a comfort & shelter from the cold
obliterating exposed where the dreams
lay wrapped, awaiting the daring dreamer,
with glints in static,
reflecting off the black-iced asphalt
littered with abandoned skeletons,
still placed where the souls of those
who made shells of them have stepped out,
anticipating flight


Dontrell Lovet't
from, [The Failed Writer]

[We Know Only of We] a poem

If we're honest,
we both know no love
story exists in me;
the fellow to draft a naturally careless
tale might be a man who doesn't
know any better;


I know of you & you of me
& we of us & of us,
whirling like fumes of flowers &
a mystic fragrance,
adventurous bodies hung
like veils,
simpering sentiments of
unintended slight

Dontrell Lovet't
from, [If It Be You]

[Twos] a poem

If it takes
your breath away as it does mine,
then we are the same
the two of us
exiled,
endangered,
three-times over damn-near
twice defeated



Dontrell Lovet't
from, [If It Be You] 

[Man-Splaining] a poem

All mean men have monsters in their heads;
All lovely women prefer their lovers dead
If she gets sick of a rose,
so could she of those fussy clothes


Dontrell Lovet't
from, [If It Be You] 

[White Phosphorus Tide] a poem

What a beautiful hint of white phosphorus you’ve become,

a whimsical of wonderful, postscript in poised counterpoint,

 unbound in an impress of literature bent there are still

 ampersand of lovers who’ve never known you somewhere along your point of gravity,

of toadies such-like in statis,

 unprivy to the seldom design of a woman womanizing

 the little girl inside that she once was-

-and since, tatters have flown with the slightest hint of breeze,

 as news articles thrown out with events no longer current,

 with the wretched who breathes only to know they will die well.

 With the fragmented things fallen away, I’ve become

 a mess of things who’ve made a mess of things,

 introduced chaos long before Pandora’s box shattered

 onto the impenetrable, flattened earth in awestruck carnal,

 love as deep and wide as the combustion of being that separates life and death.

Oh how to love this withered tree, I’ve taught you; it is from you I’ve learned to love and see a woman and we are at the center of it all

Dontrell Lovet't
-from [Leitmotif]

[What We've Done] a poem

            Things I have done,

you’ve done,

have been done before;

smothering each other with

gas lights is only self-induced

guilt-

I’ve apologized,

as I’ve done all my life,

then you’ll accept,

as all my apologies have been all my life,

double-back & give me

the dagger in an already

compromised spine

-then I’ll lie,

helplessly,

knowing paralysis will be

the story of me,

the same of you,

who has never had the

integrity to deliver a mercy

blow to an ailing lover-

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [The Failed Writer]

[Abject Threads] a poem

 

Look firmly, fair, thoroughly

upon this organic matter, animal

nihilist, all knowing, alien, neither yours,

even never myself self-possessed,

if only to know the tale of a world

a-twirl, all the same rotting-

-today I’ll contemplate if so

I shall cut the thread measured yesterday,

spun just before,

die with youth and the vigor of

truth, bright burning blights and

abject failure still a-fight with might-

-aging knows no sense of awaiting a

welcome, tends to ignore every courtesy

nor gives not another face as to make possible

the existence of idiom-

Dontrell Lovet't-from Collection of poetry [Just a Body]

[All the While the Power-Play] a poem

            You look so pretty today,

like an undeniable, undenied happiness,

& the power-play,

the night before the

last we spent together,

was predictably pleasurable,

releasing the most molecular

of myself into the wide, culpable

fauces leading down into the warmth

of your core-

-this was the day I found myself

face to face with a woman I suddenly

didn’t want nor wanted to be wanted,

if snakes were perpetually made in

the image of you,

they’d strike relentlessly,

unprovoked,

the friends you’ve scattered

like the plagues of old,

have returned, reconciled in our

confederacy;

the isolation,

the biome exceptional for

conjuring slaves,

has grown dense & rich

oasis-

-now you can go,

& as you go, you should

know your power-play has

played itself into predictability

now serpents made in your

image can be exiled from this place

in me,

or stand petulant to be

cut down to extinction-

-from [UnderStudies]
Poem by Dontrell Lovet't
Photography by Nosmot Gbadamosi

[I Carry You] a poem

I carry you with me, In me, a pretty little jewel

 that everyone envies yet since feeling has been first,

our synthesis is a whole fool in the unrelenting spring rain

- everything of me acknowledges,

my blood runs warm in kinetic magnificence

where no apostrophe lift your eyelids

 than the wisdom of paragraphs given to you

 in my arms-

even statistics have hands too small to hold your light,

wee whistles without any origin whatsoever

 now the deepest of our lives lie lengthwise,

elongated, high up riding like the soul from

 the expired cell

-and whatever the autumn refuse to sing to you,

then darling,

dearest ladybird,

then what is done is undone by

and instead we never die.

Dontrell Lovet't

-from [The Paper Womb II]

[The Hair Image] a poem

The instinctual predator in men is the instinct we would find bond;

I do admit,

I enjoyed the way you twisted your head
over the slightest befuddled sight


Dontrell Lovet't
-from [Blotted Etches]

[Nabokov's Synesthesia] an opinion on Vladimir Nabokov's [Lolita]

 Amongst the list of the Modern Library 100 Greatest novels is Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 controversial novel [Lolita.] The narrator, Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor becomes obsessed with the daughter of a woman he is renting a room from, 12 year old Dolores Haze. Set in 1947, while Humbert is working on a novel, he gradually is pulled into what he believes is no ordinary child due to her temerity and incendiary flirtatiousness. Many aware of Nabokov's remarkable works, have found pure obscenity in the subject matter of [Lolita] but there are many facts overlooked.

1: The character Humbert Humbert came of age in Europe and his creator, Nabokov, in Russia. The eras circa 1920's well into the 1960's children weren't considered merely children, but aware of life and life's facts. It was not uncommon for an older man to court a young girl or an older woman to court a young boy. Both the author and the character in his image were victims of their times, not aggressors.

2: Though Delores Haze "Lo," as Humbert Humbert endeared her, was 12 years old, the courting or sexual entanglement with her doesn't make Humbert a pedophile but more so an Ephebophile, or in latin, "a lover of adolescents."

3: In the opening of [Lolita] Humbert Humbert describes his upbringing and speaks of his first love, Annabelle. At 14, they fell in love and 4 months after, Annabelle died of Typhus. Humbert expressed that if  he had not fallen in love with Annabelle, he wouldn't have fallen in love with "Lo." Humbert even married once he became an adult but still sought out women who appeared young. This behavior may seem predatory to readers of today but with vision, we can translate the lingering, longing and yearning for his "paper womb" or a love equivalent to his most content time of his life. In theory, the day Annabelle died, so did Humbert and his aging and growth were all stunted; he as a man still trapped in a great adolescent love, forever destined to burn for it.

4: After he met and deceptively courted "Lo," during and even after he lost her, Humbert never sought out any other adolescents. Pedophiles tend to fall out of obsession with their victims when they grow older; Humbert wasn't affected in the least of her aging. He yearned for her and continued to love her, even took revenge against the man who stole her away from him during a cross-country roadtrip, Claire Cleary, the true pedophile, who recruited kids and filmed them during sexual acts.

If the reader of [Lolita] can identify with the facts of the life of Humpert Humpert and the times, they can take the time to read the most popular yet underrated novel due to "obscenity."

[The Light in You] a poem

Light may be perpetual in you,

in me,

the dark always finds a way inside.

Oh love,

I wish it weren’t so,

I wish I didn’t have to wake with fleshy wood to

abuse your venus till numb and unbearable,

the same person who loves your light

is the madman with murder in his heart,

 who all the same loving you,

envies your ability to be-

[How I Became Hers] a poem

I wanted only one thing;

that was the fire that burns bright between her legs;

to get it, I resorted to opening my heart,

to further open her thighs-

-it was then, that I became hers

-Dontrell Lovet't

[Drowning Orchids] a poem

I regret the day you melted under

the intensity of my love-

-I water my Orchids until they drown;

 this is the only way I know to love;

Pygmalion seeking Galatea’s heart to glow mad,

grow stag,

 beat furiously with intent to never want

 to know the end of that sudden electric pulse-

Dontrell Lovet't

-from [The Paper Womb II]

[Attraction & Electricity]

  We all want that one love....the look across the room, capturing each other's eyes, not out of possession or sexual response alone, but a secret dimension only shared by two individuals attracted by a certain unique electricity.

 The flow of atoms stops, become suspended, inanimate, and suddenly explode but you both are motionless, speechless, drowning out whatever obsequious conversation being that holds you under siege. Of course you don't want to be rude but at that point it's no longer under your control. Your body then starts to burn as a phosphorous bulb, becomes unstable as sodium out of kerosene, You are hoping, begging that they break eye contact and at the same time, you're hoping that time can stop, just for that moment, and that moment could last forever, that that moment could be the story of you.


  Everything now is black and white, the room is still, even if you've been drinking, your lucidity is as though you've been drinking a Hemingway Cocktail, a death in the afternoon.....and that sums up your night, that time, that moment, that very single moment of death is a sweet one. Somehow you know, those long nights of watching Netflix alone will soon come to an end, writing blogs for the lonely hearts club, eating scrambled eggs, posting on Facebook hoping someone has the bad taste to text you back. Now someone will post statuses and innuendos about you, text you back, cuddle with you as you fall asleep watching documentaries on Netflix.

  Despite the intuition, despite the obvious burning like a roman candle a lit in your viscera, your legs don't agree with you and you're hoping that if you stand there, remain in full view, motionless, the urge shared between you two isn't as powerful as to cause them too to remain still. Humans crave affection, connection, it's innate, involuntary, a dimension like a sinkhole that refuses to release you, those boats against the tide that Fitzgerald spoke of and eventually, your arms gets tired, your body fatigued and who'll be there to save you from that inevitable sink?

.......they come over, that slow stroll that seems an eternity.

"I'm glad you are here tonight."

Dontrell Lovet't

[Bluestocking Blues] a poem

            These unseeing eyes,

scattered lights and winks spread like wings,

searching through the litter for some unremarkable

object,

there she was,

as beautiful and unmistakable as a

corpse neatly laid out in a field of flowers;

If I said anything worth hearing, it was

missed, by both our care,

we could agree,

nothing said could erased everything

we said that lit the fire at the very

point we became undone

She returned carrying the belief in our own

glamour, the lie now much lighter now

that it was free from our combined efforts,

now present in her arms in its downright conceit,

in all grins of having destroyed, undoubtedly certain

of its ability to continue to destroy-

-looking at her, she was torn, shredded, a colossal

spectacle easily mistaken for some Goddess long

banished from all she’s known and ever will,

an orbit of helplessness,

where she’s likely to take anything offered,

even an elixir sure to kill her without any harsh

aftertaste, all afterglows from thenceforth-

-there’s no longer a correspondence to an dream

interpretation, no more a slight white where her

eyes use to attached to the back of her head when

every inch of me reaches into the ascending of her womb;

we are much more a vision as a smoulder,

the way the world treats us is a prejudice we

never have the affordability to mind,

my bluestockings,

our blues is not the end of us,

it is our new epoch-

-from [UnderStudies]

Dontrell Lovet't

[Cry Beautiful, Nightjar] a poem

            -just when you think,

you become thoughtless,

I, without anything credible to say,

to pull you from the war-torn

dreamscape terraformed the very

instance we said “Hello.”

we are entitled to nothing,

we’ve forfeited that right;

and this hell we reside in,

is our hell to accept-

-from [UnderStudies]

Dontrell Lovet't

[Residual Mess] a poem

-you were gone,

So you are no longer here,

To see the mess you’ve left

Or the mess you’ll never again make-

-from [UnderStudies]

[The News of Amedeo Modigliani's Death]

            You could say she looks familiar, perhaps a woman you’ve seen while walking down the crowded sidewalks in a city you’re not a native of; her olive features appears she may be a descendant of that boot shaped peninsula in southern Europe, the one that lost its might and will to fight at the decimation of the Roman Empire, transforming itself into a nation of seduction rather brute force. Modigliani is Italy, and so is she, Marie, the daughter of the people, appearing in 1918, in the 24 year of Modigliani’s life, 2 years prior to his death. Perhaps it was an homage to a death he knew was impending, an inevitable obituary one writes, savoring their own vanity, so gargantuan, the subject of death itself fails to render it obsolete.

            This voice, all canvas, all olive texture in the frame, form and symmetry of Marie, is latent, then and now, a war-cry given a century after the conclusion of a war that has wiped clean a nation once occupied by its own illusions. Does this explain the grey emptiness in the eyes of Marie? Or the elongated stretch of her body, as if she herself is peering through a window with a distorted view as to investigate the gossip of a world gone quiet herself? And does she ever conclude those rumors to be of substantial truth?

            Indeed she does; so she pulls her hair behind her neck, wraps it in a dense black tie, dresses herself too in black, becoming two years prior, an attendant at the burial of her creator, her peace spoken from the dazzling arches of dulled lips.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[Olga] Pablo Picasso's right-side immortal

          Anyone who has ever had the initiative to visit Paris, that is for its rich history as an artistic mecca, may have become familiar with the adoration of Parisiennes; Napoleon III and Olga Picasso, two, some would say, with as much inclination as the next, defined an era of art between Napoleon’s reign and Olga’s zenith.

          Born in the Russian Empire in 1891, in what is today Ukraine, Olga’s childhood ambition to be a ballerina was the very dream that brought her face to face with Pablo. Already making a name for himself as an artist, Picasso designed the costumes for [Parade], Sergei Diaghilev’s and Jean Cocteau’s collaborative ballet, which took center stage at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. And as classic Picasso, propelling charm, intelligence and the spell of the artist, Olga departed the touring ballet as she delved into a freefall love affair with Picasso, who invited her back to live with him in Paris upon their return from Barcelona that very year.

          Almost a year since the day they met, in 1918, Olga Khokhlova became Olga Picasso in the observation of Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau. While the Great War (the war to end all) was coming to a final yet destructive close and the Great Influenza became its predecessor, taking the life of both August and Rose Rodin, Olga became Pablo’s first wife and the mother of his first-born child and son, Paulo. The birth of Paulo was the birth of their deterioration as a couple. After discovering Pablo’s affair with his 17-year-old Paramore, Olga took Paulo and moved to southern France, filing for the divorce which Pablo would refuse due to, under French Law, having required to divide his estate evenly with Olga. Olga would be married to Picasso until her death in 1955 but with Picasso, when those four years of inseparability was abundant, Olga picked up the brush, familiarized herself with acrylic, led Pablo to place vivid vision on bland canvas, creating unimaginable masterpieces. It came be said that Olga, as his muse and wife alone, was another era in the many Pablo Picasso would begin, but the only to eroded across all the rest.

          Evolutionary Biologist would postulate that monogamy for most humans is such a difficult feat inasmuch we, as a species, weren’t meant to be monogamous and with that very postulation, Pablo isn’t given an out or exclusion from breaking his vows, even in biology, a man’s crimes committed are always his to be held accountable for. If the “Non-monogamy” postulation so happens to prove solid, then too is its other half, the part which makes marriage so much more a beautiful becoming, something that endures, if love is enough to deter two humans from their own biological pull, stay afloat against the falling waves of overwhelming odds, dance in the dazzle of “temporary insanity,” an act that has been known to prolong its effects. Pablo’s legacy required 9 decades to solidify; between 1917 and 1921, was all that was needed for Olga, her reparation, the part of the estate she was denied, having endured love for such a restless soul as Pablo, so that our admiration of her sacrifice, can find its place to dance on her tongues as she once dance in Chatelet.

-Dontrell Lovet't