Varied Indecencies Increasing in Length – Jacob Madkour

September 2, 2025

On the Linguistics of Intercourse

 

I hate when I am having sex with someone
and the person I am having sex with
says my name.

Please,
don’t remind me.

 

I’ve Never Minded

 

The friends I’m staying with all long asleep
Almost morning and pale sun
Begins its breaching
Of night’s dark now
I am walking their
Mostly empty block
This city I am not from

And every arrangement
Of potted plant on stoop
Shadow form cast inside
Empty parked car
Pile of trash bags
Littered cross the curb
Seeming from a distance
Like the body of another

As always
I am so far from alone
And blessed still are the many
Whose arms I wouldn’t have minded dying in

 

7 Tears 7 Doves 7 Blunts

 

In the realm of metaphor,
I’ve always been
mostly incapable, inept
in both usage and understanding.
And so,
the same way I did
in church school as a youth,
I imagine the days
Noah spent in the Ark
as days spent
in a giant, actually-existing,
labyrinth-like structure,
big enough for the
6,744 animals estimated
to have been in there with him,
feeling little else beside fondness
for those, who, out of pure wonder,
parsed through Genesis,
its conundrums, to deduce
an exact figure for
the attendance of what is
probably the first and still
the largest sleepover ever,
and Noah’s dove, how he’d sent it out,
its returning one night
with the olive leaf. The dove,
holy spirit incarnate, the leaf,
a sign of life’s continuance outside,
a rapper I quite like,
often referring to doves,
also to pink cell phones, tears
made of codeine, bedazzled pistols,
living on a dirt road,
and being generally sad,
but celebrating this fact as
proof of feeling. Here the dove
means the same thing it means
in Genesis, but more immediate.
Like wow, look at it fly there,
so tender and glown all white. We
live amongst such beauty and feel
so many things. The sun never failing
to set or return again. Days past
and days to come, both more
than we could ever count.
It is all beyond us and horrifying.
It is all perplexing and gorgeous.
It is all godsent and blessed.
It is all there all there is.

 

An Old Friend’s Transmissions

 

A dear friend
Living in the city with a girl
Who on their first date gifted him
Hidden in the pages of a bad novel
This pink ribbon soaked in her own blood
He sends me videos
Of workplace accidents
Gorey tragedies
Transmitted from factories
In countries where
Safety protocols are null
Limbs stripped of skin
By textile contraption
Railway laborers
Severed at the waist
By oncoming train

His Father
A military man
Currently stationed in Greece
Sends him links to articles about ice walls
The hidden things of Antarctica
History’s abundance
Of assassins never found
My friend
He receives these
And is reminded terribly
Of the time in a Red Roof Inn
In Camden New Jersey
Where drunk together in their room
They wrestled and his Dad
Having lost to him
Afterward just
Wept and wept and wept

We’ve been reading Faulkner obsessively
This friend of mine and I
Revering blood of lineage and how endless
Decrying modernists of Europe
Their assertion that a novel
Takes place across a week a day
Our worship of American prose
Its tending to the sprawl of generations
Its gospels and birth and birth and birth
He calls me from the city today
It’s good to hear his voice
We talk about all this only sort of
Feeling more stupid than usual
And instead making dumb sex jokes
Mispronouncing Faulkner’s name
Jumbling up the titles of his books

“I faulked her in the light of August and
She moaned absalom absalom” I say
“I went down on her like moses” he says
“She made sounds of fury
I was an intruder in her dust”
We laugh and laugh at this
We talk about how it’s been raining
Most days these days
How seeing a pretty girl
Makes us want to weep
And as always with old friends
We are in agreement
Nothing bad has ever happened

 

In Relation to Judas Iscariot

 

He is still of the trinity,
second only to sustainer of things,
in other words, His Father—it is
Judas who betrayed them all; and she
asleep atop the covers where usually I lay alone,
her hair, splayed like cursive, breath, like slow thunder,
above her resting head, gold in lamplight, were I to reach
into the empty space there: a halo.
And I’d retrieve it to wear like pearls
until returned to her by sunrise.
It’s been growing a good while now,
this worry of hers, how I am never sleeping,
and the majority of my nights spent beside
open window smoking, thinking always:
If I was a good man I’d be beside her now.
In truth, I’ve never dreamt, not once, but have seen in empty dark,
glow of thousand candles made from severed fingers,
how they encircled the ritual’s display,
the speared lamb now laid dead, cradled by bed of hay,
berry vine strung through its flesh, and vine’s fruits
still intact—the result of nimble embroidery—and
all around it, the children were laughing.
The fact that the birth of each season
required the opposite—a spilling of blood,
a leaving of light, and then the creature is gone—
it went unquestioned, was a tolerated mystery.
The children didn’t care, they danced,
laughed and danced. A joy felt in suspension.
Far from wear of elements, desert, or frontier prison;
and such sacred grounds, never solid, so where, then,
did Judas feed Him to the hordes for battery, flanking,
to be identified a false prophet? And the floorboard
into which the cross was plunged, how far down,
the expanse beneath it, and the blood from his crown,
has it touched bottom? He, for a sum, turned in by Judas,
but tenderness never forgotten, executed
with a kiss—the beginning of sacrifice;
and if she wished to remain here, asleep like this forever,
the peace of her closed eyes, and sun of each morning
awash over their lids, unaware of the rest of days,
their coming and going. It would all be comfort enough.
I’d admit defeat, set off, preferably west,
but at the very least, far from here.
I have failed to love her, she has forgiven me,
I want nothing more than punishment instead; her stomach,
exposed to airs about as she sleeps face up,
the skin, with each breath inflating then descending again
to hug the sharpness of ribs, the rise and fall, like sea-tide
and in its deep: echo of failure, loss of many, a ship goes down.
In her flesh, its heaven-white, the well-made, duvet-idyll
of my parents’ marriage bed, from which,
there had never been echo, or loss of anything,
only silence, a stark loneliness of two. And I have seen
grey-fog morning filled with guilt, and church bells
seeming to chant, ‘death to the world!’;
barren amusement parks with ghosts of soldiers
riding silent, unpleased; the hands of poets,
strangling necks of swans, draining life to feel full,
to have something to write, and coming up empty;
bones of strange animals unmanned
drumming water of creeks. There were no longer any flags,
the buildings sighed, Christ wept in his office, all his degrees
framed on the wall went blank, failed at language.
And afraid to speak of it, of its absence,
we wondered quiet where music had gone,
and still do. I can’t recall the last time there’s been any.
And he’d known it, tender Judas, that this dread of static dream,
would blow in coldly through each open window,
and we’d need nothing more than the memory of the violence,
that which fell from him to remind us of true wanting; tonight,
the quiet hours, ones remembered as the light leaves,
feeling blessed to have witnessed it,
her body, bare, held by bare body,
my own, held by hers as well. I am baptized in her sweat.
I tried to swallow her ear.
We fail to remember it, how fusion at the loins
is never enough, and the regret always commencing
that we are not the skin our fingers touch,
our desire for mostly pain, burial in field of blood,
hands and feet like His, nailed through unto woodgrain;
to be pinned, spread, starved, given, humiliated unto frailty;
and as the sun tumbles, the moon spilling its blood,
to be cold, so cold. There is so much I can’t remember.
I am beginning to think he was one of history’s more decent turncoats.
Besides, I think we’d agree about what goes on here these days.
Real betrayal is extinct and all that’s truly evil is an absolute bore.
The thirty silver piece for which he ratted on Christ
could barely pay a full month’s rent in our many metropolis’—
mere plastic Jerusalems compared to the holy cities he’d known.
We’re all belching so much bile now, Judas, you wouldn’t believe.
The pews are packed with the worst of us, and it’s the central tragedy
of all our lives, this contradiction, how we’ll never be younger again,
and dually, will never not be. I want to come to bed now.
As she sleeps beside me, I want
to nestle into her shoulder, speak softly into her ear:
I accept everything entirely.
I am sorry, truly;
I will always be a child.