Gay Poem «

January 21, 2010

FAG/HAG SERIES: SPLATTERED

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the DNA
her grandmother thinks we share,
nor the romantic meal:
chocolate chip cookies and pretzels
mixed with Coca-Cola and stomach acid,
a potent molotov cocktail
that wiped away my new car smell.
This is a story we’d tell our children
if we were parental material.
Instead we’ll tell great nieces and nephews
about the time their aunt erupted,
about how the middle-aged vomit in one’s thirties
is so different than the party-fueled vomit
of one’s twenties. And just like the twenties,
when I’d tell drunken, stumbling beaus
Just take off your clothes
I say the same to her
but add, removing
chewed chunks of carbohydrates
from the tiny hairs
on my arm, Ain’t no boundaries
left to cross.
Rest in peace, purse and pocketbook!
Goodbye cell phone
that called me repeatedly
as it went haywire throughout the afternoon
and hazardous waste
dripped deep into its data.
Farewell all the ways I’ve wronged her:
we’re even now.
Yesterday she spewed
and I stared in horror.
Today I gave her another ride
and when she looked down
and saw I’d missed a spot with the cleaning rag,
we gagged hysterically
and I wrote this poem.

34 comments

July 3, 2009

BOY MAKING LOVE TO THE GULF OF MEXICO

He made love
to the Gulf of Mexico,
a hundred thousand
drooling waves jumping
over themselves,
a hundred thousand
drooling men playing
leapfrog to reach him
with sea-slick fingers
and gravity,
weightless exhibitionist
on his hands and knees,
belly down at dawn,
paying no mind
to the voyeur with the camera
or the jogger who
pretends not to watch.

25 comments

June 21, 2009

MISS CALIFORNIA

Miss California
your mouth misfired and melted your crown,
Golden State Goddess tossed
from your throne and into the
mud, from coronation to common,
as average as us, let me cover you
with worthier titles.

How about
Miss Judge
our voice of vindication,
the cohesiveness of a community
unwilling to go silently into that lonely night,
not when we should have our
wives and husbands beside us.

How about
Miss Educated
on what makes a family,
on your belief that we aren’t meant to be because
the math does not add up,
but if you paid attention in arithmetic,
you would know that addition comes easier
than division.

How about
Miss Interpret
the concept of freedom, your idea that
we live in a land where the majority
can choose the rights of the minority,
but honey,
it’s not a choice.

Or how about simply
Carrie, the blond-haired girl
without sash or tiara, who
won’t forget us now, to whom I’ll introduce
myself as Bryan, to whom I’ll introduce
this handsome man as Christopher,
love of my life, and one day, Carrie,
our country will recognize him the same way I do,
and if you aren’t lucky enough to have what we have,
you’re sadly
Miss Ing’Out.

25 comments

March 16, 2009

BITE

He tells me to use my teeth,
scrape the skin just barely,
just enough to

make him feel it.

This from the boy who caught me like a hungry fish
on his shiny, perfect hook,
the minnow who swam like dinner in my bedroom oceans,
luring me with rubescent cheeks above and below,
the one who stood out
in schools of leaders and followers,
traveling, colorful clouds of tumbling positions.

This from the gentle boy whose quickening currents
I’d fought to slow into liquid forgetfulness
with nibbles so near to the back of his neck,
my stealthy arms drifting toward but never to, never around
his river-strong body.

This from the quiet boy washed to me
dripping and naked but safe and willing
along my crooked coastline,
carried along by my pleas for the pronunciation of pain
to float from his fluid vocabulary.

This from the trophy boy I saved from drowning,
into whose depths I’d so often dreamt
not of plunging piston-like with steam rising in
a delta vapor of swampy lust,
but of sinking sweetly and slowly to the bottom
with the carefulness of a trickling southern stream,
soft and with love.

This after he and I together tread bodies of sun-warmed water
undiscovered by all, untouched by any man,
the same boy with me as we reach the surface and gasp for air,
when there’s not an inch of dry land in sight,

it is this boy who turns from tadpole to shark
and tells me

make it hurt.

Acknowledgement: This poem appeared in the 9th issue of Breadcrumb Scabs and in the January 2010 issue of Ganymede. It also appears in My Life as Adam.

15 comments

December 27, 2008

NEWSWORTHY

I write poetry from Small Town, Arkansas,
where my throbbing words
stab through your standards,
where my songs leap like shirtless children

from trailerpark to trailerpark
where women gossip, shocked
and appalled on the worn heels
of Bud Light hiccups

in watercooler towns
where dry-thighed secretaries
cry God Almighty!
there’s homosexuals among us

and they dare to live and love,
to work, to pray, to cry
to fuck, to have history,
and then dare to write about it?

Prying eyes, welcome here,
same as friend or foe or lover or ghost,
those who scan these pages
line by syllable, hoping

for something front-page worthy,
illiterate of the past,
knowing not it’s old news,
my heroes were put on trial:

Ginsberg’s magnificent “Howl”
smelled dirty and obscene,
Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”
left your men hiding erections.

You want the beautiful immoral,
read “Thomas” by Vytautas Pliura.
You want poetic orgasm, taste
“Blueberries” by Kirk Read.

If you want a sexually-monstrous mind
ask Dennis Cooper to dance
or peer into your husband’s frontal lobe.
I’ve been around enough to know

art is supposed to shake you
art is supposed to bend you over
and dominate and leave you walking
slowly and off balance.

Art compels me
to beg, on my knees,
let me take your pen
and with its poisoned point

carve deep into my cheeks
marks of war
for I am limp wristed
and battle scarred, yes,

but limp wristed and battle scarred
with grenade in hand
throwing bombs of verb and pronoun
and scandalous adjective

but it’s you who take these strings
of sin and syntax
into backrooms and gutters
as I profess my love

for humanity, for conflict, for dic
tionaries, it’s you
who feel something stir within,
sticky and sweet and lingering

even after you decide to swallow,
and to those who feign distaste
at lyrical erotica and heart-blood splattered
and stained pixilated screens

and gasp
and throw forearms dramatically
against foreheads
covered with discount-store makeup,

I am the dark parts
of your bargain-bin fantasies
but with each click of the key
with each jolt of anger I send

to seethe your soul
I become more and more
what I want to be,
the maestro of metaphor,

the composer of controversy,
to you I am the devil
but them, I am
David and Goliath

locked in a torrid embrace,
a passionate spit-filled kiss,
I am Moses standing naked on the mountaintop,
my songs etched in stone,

and to my audience I sing
in a voice strong and confident,
proclaiming, commanding:
I have not yet begun to write.

14 comments

Tag: Gay Poem