Month: April 2011

Anais Nin

The insatiable Anais Nin
Had a great predilection to sin:
To quote Henry Miller,
(Who didn’t fulfill her),
Anais was nice to be in.

Though Anais would climax and swoon,
Henry Miller, she wrote, came too soon.
When he ran out of puff,
She’d still not had enough,
So she also seduced his wife, June.

It was such fun to be avant-garde;
Life was one long, risqué masquerade:
Having orgies with friends,
Any means to all ends,
Reading books by the Marquis de Sade.

Since she frankly described in her journal
Her sexual exploits nocturnal,
We know about Nin…
From her smooth, silky skin
To her slippery organs internal.

In Anais’s book, “Little Birds”,
Which is littered with four-letter words,
She wrote of erotica,
Sex and exotica,
Pretty much roughly in thirds.

Madame Nin’s work was not pornographic;
It dealt, though, with sex, straight and sapphic:
In “Delta of Venus”,
The cunt and the penis
Commingle in sociable traffic.

Back in Paris, between the World Wars,
Behind veils, or curtains of gauze,
Naked, prone or supine,
Blurred and thin was the line
Between rich, refined ladies and whores.