Carl Hancock Rux

Carl Hancock Rux Poems

Carl Hancock Rux Biography

Carl Hancock Rux (born March 24, in Harlem, New York City) is an award winning playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, performer, theater director and recording artist. He is the author of several publications including "Pagan Operetta" (poetry), Asphalt (novel) and the OBIE award winning play Talk; as well as director of the Bessie Schonberg (New York Dance and Performance Awards, informally known as the Bessie Awards) award winning music theater work "Stained" by Lisa Jones and Alva Rogers. His archives are housed at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library, the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution as well as the Film and Video/Theater and Dance Library of the California Institute of the Arts. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Doris Duke Awards for New Works, the Doris Duke Charitable Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts Prize and the Alpert Award in the Arts)

The Best Poem Of Carl Hancock Rux

Asylum Of Gestures

Conflation of rapture and regret
born out in those sequestered regions
of the body, unterrained —
outlawed by our
mothers, subjected to extreme
lore of hope and monotheism —

turns when
you touch me — an apocalypse
of destroying temples, and murdering eunuchs
who keep the Sabbath,

The sins of strangers
that guard the covenant are robbed when you
transgress the rules of my stomach…

An unfettered desire
discovers my feet
naked at the threshing floor
(where you have been forbidden to sleep
for centuries)…

In elegant disobedience you lie there,
like the heads of Hydra —
laureate corpses
scalpeled against velvet,
strumming a mandolin
tongue soaked in wine
gourd of honey roped at your waist…

hair pinned with pigeon heads and peacock feathers
red amber and coral beads —
dress of
gold and yellow
tiny mirrors sewn into its bodice,

Rasputin's mouth
slips palm oil into mine

In these, our last years toward a millennium
we make dust of leviathans, leave our mothers
aging alone in the apartments of our youth
burn the bodies of priests upon
alters who refuse to admit they know something
about
decadence and its legacy
toward complete holiness —

The discourse of liberation and pagan practices,
its contribution to the reshaping
of identity
becomes a private dialect between thigh and toenail
regarding what savages scratched into walls
years before the comet came crashing down
spilling molten ore, petrifying the reality of
kisses such as ours…

Photograph us if you like, lover
our detonate throe
and the lure of primitive interaction
between us…

Carl Hancock Rux Comments