Rep. Eric Swalwell is making light of erotic poetry he wrote when he was a 19-year-old college student.
Swalwell, a California gubernatorial candidate, contributed the poem “Hungover From Burgundy” to literary magazine The Lyricist as part of a creative writing class at North Carolina’s Campbell University, according to the Daily Mail, which acquired the poem from Joel Gilbert, a right-wing film director and activist who opposes Swalwell’s bid.
The two-stanza poem describes, among other things, “kissing till veins imploded and exploded”—with “blood rolled down our chins.”
Swalwell, 45, brushed off any attempts to damage his campaign.
“You think my poetry at 19 was bad?” he wrote after the New York Post had picked up the story. “Wait til you see my 12-yr old diary.”
For now, there is just the poem:
And there beauty was,
Formless and magnificent—
A flurry of limbs and nails.
She chased and I ran,
I chased and She ran.
Atop my hotel she stopped,
And I lept for cloth and tan,
My anxious arm she bit—my scar is beautiful.
While I screamed,
She bent her lips to mine.
Kissing till veins imploded and exploded,
Till blood rolled down our chins,
For bounded mouths cannot speak of parting.
In the morning
I awoke beside beauty’s shadow—
Her form sloppy and her legs pale.
My scar lost,
My lips cracked and dry.
And we groaned simultaneously.
The poem resurfaced thanks to Gilbert, whose directing credits include the conspiracy-indulging Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison, Elvis Found Alive, and Dreams from My Real Father, in which Gilbert not only pushes the baseless theory that former President Barack Obama’s father was not Barack Obama Sr., but that his mother posed for nude photographs.
With those credentials, Gilbert, 61, tried to gin up some disgust about the then-19-year-old’s poem.
“It’s disturbing how he eroticizes violence,” he told the Mail. “You have to wonder what Swalwell’s woke allies in the #MeToo movement would make of his flippant alignment of drunkenness, abuse and casual sex.”
Gilbert just so happens to want Swalwell away from the California governor’s mansion. Last month, he filed a lawsuit challenging the lawmaker’s eligibility for office, claiming he doesn’t live in the Golden State.
Swalwell pledged to fight the matter in court.
“Like all congressmen from CA, I live in CA and DC,” Swalwell wrote on Facebook. “This MAGA idiot also tried to smear the Obamas, Al Gore, and Elvis! They ignored him. But I’ll beat him in court.”
As far as other politicians’ poetry goes, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s was also criticized. Except Kennedy (allegedly) wrote his not as a college student, but as a senior citizen. Its recipient: the four-decade-younger journalist Olivia Nuzzi.
