Category Archives: self-portrait

colony

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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Your path is in the sea, your path is in the great waters and your footsteps are not known. — from, Psalm 77

Rusty iron ore tramp steamer painted pink

with a great garden of vegetables up

 

on deck. A tribe of wayfarers, with ink

and love, to sail the steamer, to worship

 

the waves and all of us in it. Gorgeous

sea-rose, wide mid-ocean. A colony

 

of cats, of cast-off children, of purpose

other than all this land-locked misery.

 

Fresh food, fresh water, fresh love; the rhythm

of the voyage slumbers in us. Sea trance

 

and dream. I want part of this tribal blood

of friends and lovers — in a rust-bottom

 

pink ship. I want a myth and a romance.

I want a voyage both wild and sacred.

niña roja

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

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NIÑA ROJA, Red Girl. SANTA MUERTE,

Lady of Death. I pray to you: bring me

 

the ghost of she who told me to obey

my dream: “Love, come to the cemetery,

 

find my grave.” NIÑA, you know I’m sinful

in bed. MUERTE, you know that I’m honest

 

in my perversions. She came to me, full

of ghost blood and ghostly lust. Now my lust

 

keeps me awake at night. If she’ll return

once more I’ll bless my next nine orgasms

 

in your name, bring you cinnamon and burn

your red candles. NIÑA, shaker of limbs.

 

MUERTE, Saint Death, I beg of you, again,

bring this lovesick ghost back to me. Amen.

cupid’s malcontents

31 Tuesday Jul 2018

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My trash-talk needs work. I want more than gloom’s

muzak, more than these chrome mall mannequins,

 

half-clothed, standing guard near the changing rooms.

Stripped, I abhor what I see. It frightens

 

me how I’ve changed. Once I reveled in loss,

desperate for your tongue. Transfixed with romance

 

halfway down my throat. I loved all chaos;

all of Cupid’s malcontents in hot pants.

 

I was all that I’d take a bullet for

because there will always be some foul dude

 

afraid of the fab, of soft boys, who’d bust

a cap in anything rad and cocksure.

 

Picture this: a queen standing hard and nude

in a changing room — hard and still in lust.

fucktard

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Feminism, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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We are swine, wild boars among the bluegrass

and salt-stained rocks. We are bitches, each teat

 

engorged, each rump distended. We are sass

and rage. Each foul word you use to mistreat

 

others — fucktard, ignoramus, nitwit —

that is us, too. Why does liberation

 

for you crave vile behavior? I’m unfit

to judge, clearly. Still, I love my cousin

 

even if my cousin doesn’t love me.

Today’s rebel is tomorrow’s tyrant

 

without this connection, without these ties

to each other that make us family.

 

We own the words that you use: faggot, cunt,

‘tard. So we defy you. We love. We rise.

of the three

09 Thursday May 2013

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of the three

This dream … I dream of this every single night, being washed over the side of a ship and having the goddess of the waves, a shadow from the deep masquerading in the skin of great white shark, swallow me whole … for the last ten years when I dream. If I dream. I wrote this for my master’s thesis:

Of the three – Hart Crane,
Li Po and me – Li died
moon viewing in the dark.
Crane drowned at 3
and I was eaten by a shark
– or so they say.

It was true in 2003 when I was in Coos Bay, Oregon and saw a shadow in the waves. Even now I can hear her calling for me. I am a coward for living on dry land. Then I laugh because don’t we all try to run away from our fate? Ai, fate.

that’s enough for me

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Illustration and art, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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putney in wintertime.

putney in wintertime.

London and a diet of shrimp curry,
Southern Comfort, hashish; I can recall
my poor hip pressed up against your icy

wall. We spooned all “winta.” Your Gravesend drawl
made me giggle. We loved Aladdin Sane.

I won’t list faults. Complaining kinda blows.

Why should I complain about love? Complain
it did not work? As if no beasts, heroes,
singers or thinkers ever once fucked up.

We don’t talk about redheaded witchcraft
or She Who Cannot Be Named. Talk is cheap.

Betrayal poems cheaper. I’m grown up.
You’re dead … so what? Once you told me you laughed
with joy as I lay in your arms, asleep.

in illness came a void at the foot of my bed

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in Illustration and art, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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wayfaring

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened” — translators John Moyne & Coleman Barks

Last night I was ill again, the fever
that comes and goes, the blood cough, the bone itch.
No one came to visit. Not in my bed
and not in my dreams. Empty. Blank. A night
like that terrifies me. A void, despite
everything I know about dreams, the dead,
and the veil. It was as if a light switch
had been thrown. The silence was a torture.
I have never questioned the dead, they claimed
to know what they were doing. Plus, so what?
We the living always claim to know death
inside and out. We want death to be tamed;
we want our dead lovers as living smut;
our nights as orgies filling our last breath.

killing the fey

16 Friday Nov 2012

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Yoked to my lisp, I want you to know
this compulsive arching and pulling and
expanding of flesh at the gym burns
my flesh yellow. I live

in a town where lumbering, stiff
postures serve as reference, where
cropped “Are You Butch Enough?”
buzz cuts act as testimonial.

Where the gym’s trainer says: to be totally hot,
to be truly huge, you need this fat burner!
Get jacked! Get slammed!

I hear the body is
our only sanctuary.

Where men at the bars say: I may be gay but
at least I’m not a queen. Or fat. Or femme. Where

I feel that stare at my back: Hey faggot! Hey
faggot! Hey! How do they know?

I accept, I accept all this.

*

Yoked to my lisp, I want
you to know Hitler took us
Hundred-and-Seventy-Fivers
to stretch us out. Recall

Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code
would have defined me

as one of the “unneeded consumers,”
one of the men “incurably sick” with effeminacy.

Is this why I’d try to reshape my body?
Since I’m judged not by an act, but

rather this sashay?
What do I do with these butterfly hands?

It might still happen. It will
have to happen. It happened before
(I was scared, I cowered, I swore).

I have studied these men: I may
be gay but at least I’m not a queen.
Did it happen to them? A queen?

Is that all I am? Here
in this suburban bungalow,
behind these drapes,

this cross, this little madonna (what was it
that they saw in our bodies?) alone

in a white room, my lisp singes the air,
infusions of smoke from the factory.

*

I accept, I accept all this. There is a word
I carry with me: mannweiber, “manwoman,”

a word used near Buchenwald, at Dora-Mittelbau,
where camphor and elms shivered over the lanes

leading to the underground cement factory
where we Hundred-and-Seventy-Fivers
were to be “bent straight.”

My body burns yellow to recall
when we were incurably sick. Hey,

faggot! my body burns, their words
branded into my frame:

mannweiber “manwoman”

mannweibchen “boygirl”

mädchenjunge “boybitch”

*

I’ve tried to live anonymously, I’ve tried to live
with it. I’ve
tried

under the spectator’s stare, and I feel
that stare at my back. I accept,
I accept, at least I am
a queen.