The Jill Kelly Poems by Alessandro Porco

Publisher misFit, Price: $16.95 paperback, ISBN: 1550226878, Page count: 60 pp., Released March 2005

I fear poetry. With that said, Alessandro Porco’s The Jill Kelly Poems are hilarious and visceral. They are honest and raw in that “Hey, roomie, will you wash my buttplug collection?” way, rendered and delivered in triptych: cultural “Bad Boys,” pornographic “Jill Kelly,” and the clever self-reference of “Porcoda.”

Porco doesn’t know it yet, but he and I are perfectly paired. He: a culturally adept hip poet seducing with a well-formed and delightfully oddly placed phrase. Me: a virgin (you can question this later). Who can resist such soulful eyes?

Those eyes that miss little in imagining cultural icons keepin’ it real or strutting off the field; icons reduced to fucking and sucking just like you and me, skippy. My virginal knowledge of culture left me battered and confused (Monday Night Football?), but Porco had me back with Chow Yun Fat and Jose Cuervo. And this is his power (lest it sound like a complaint): he is packing one fat stack of cultural knowledge and putting it on display. If you don’t like anal maybe you’ll like oral?

Porco whisks and tosses words like “pussy farts” and “soft ice-cream” together, catching them mid-air with an ink pen tip; not a drop is wasted. His use of ESPN catchphrases to capture a ménage à Bush twins or his pirate banter slyly pokes at our pleasures, hidden or otherwise.

Sensual pleasures that “sip twist-cap strawberry wine from a swirly-straw pool-side” or “twattle my tiddle” are moveable feasts, and like any lover worth his weight in spunk, Porco balances with strokes to the intellect: “corresponding theoretical lingo/Making as much sense to me as barking dingoes.” And, when he asks, “Kink, anyone?” Why, yes, please!