theory, poetry, general faggotry

edit of a poem from early 2009:

“reach”

pennsylvania preschool
lifted to fence
fingers, tiny white, tickle
pink nostril
glossy black eyes
lazily unveiling
curtain of thick lash.

warm, solid nuns

ash and bone,
blushed in the winter

small, I grasped to feel

hummingbird fattens on red syrup,
delicate with concern.

could I quantify your permanence?
calculate investment?
were there a common coast,
how long would I flourish, if
deprived nectar?
sustainability matters,
terrestrial or otherwise.

(I’ve wings too smooth for film)

“taut”

want strings
fingers looped and
bent at your measure
tugged with intent
heavy will
knot to the wrist
span of palm to guide
spared time for grace
for hours
wristwatch crystal
marking a slow
steady drip
marking a slow
wristwatch crystal
for hours
spared time for grace
span of palm to guide
knot to the wrist
heavy will
tugged with intent
bent at your measure
fingers looped and
want strings

“Rockridge”

Chins up
dog walkers speed past
the tranny on the curb reading bechdel
but the dogs notice
sniffing the knees, necks bent
forcing against the leash, pull

Mom used to holler, dogs jumped to nuzzle
the long zipper of her blue jeans
“female!” as if the dog was checking

I hesitate to holler
what the animal simply knows

Sexual organs splayed on the sidewalk
for yuppies to sniff
lick
analyze

I. Affect and the Virtual Body

There is difficulty finding a proper use for my mouth around you. Fight the tendency to part the lips, soften the tongue. I’m told this is no longer prudent. The mouth wants what it wants, a bit of skin from behind your ear, or perhaps the underside of your breast. The mouth has historically been ill-informed. Lips purse now; I’m learning this way. You press your wet face deeper into my collarbone. My mouth nearly mutinies. Feelings are a coping mechanism, a sorting device for the vast ocean of possible emotions constantly swirling around us. I’m trying to resist your catching sadness.

This is how it works: you were born, and everyone in the delivery room was feeling things, and they told you. And you understood. When you got older you saw your mother in the kitchen, watching the news on a tiny television. Towers with planes wedged into them. You asked why she was crying, and she told you. You went to school and everyone was sad and so you were sad. You walked outside and the cars all had plastic flags strapped to their antennae and they were all crying. This is how you learned tragedy. But you could have been angry, or ecstatic, or bitter, or bored, or amused, or anything. A virtual body of options, overwhelmingly possible. Choice quells the anxiety. Everyone was sad then.

I preferred the unpinned anxiety. Sympathy is easier, empathy is catching. I stroke your hair, a skateboarder flies past in the dark, illuminated momentarily by a streetlamp. I want to ask about your mother, but instead squeeze until your ribcage stops shaking. This embrace is complicated like all queer things are. Wedged between us, a sea of possibilities: shame, anger, loneliness, abandonment, lust, fear, regret. I have chosen not to choose and it’s unsettling.

II. Misrecognition and the Mirror Stage

This is the story of a break-up. Or the opposite of that— a breakdown? A fix-up? It doesn’t mean much, the poetics of an end, or maybe a beginning. It’s hard to say and besides, I would rather tell you about misrecognition. The moment of perception, an imaginary body framed by a mirror, a more complete silhouette: this is my skin. Your skin is also reflective, just easier said. Skin is difficult to organize. A network of capillaries woven into the flesh, a breathing organ. Bodies touched by the world incorporate air.

Mirrors make less sense. The skin scatters like beads across the glass. Visits to my grandmother’s condo, still and heavily scented, stale and stagnant. The carpet depresses beneath my young feet, I can feel the prick of its tacks against my toes. Ease closer to the girl in the mirrored closet doors, prod her face, watch puberty’s slow glacial overhaul. A year later, shampoo steam clouds the glass, and the dropped towel escapes logic. The body betrays. All bodies betray.

All bodies betray.

Mirrors, fleshy or otherwise, are not as solid as they look. In ancient cathedrals, the stained glass is quite thin at the top, rather thick at the bottom. Glass spreads slowly, but moves nonetheless. It’s only a matter of time before this reflection shifts again. I find faith in our instability.

III. An Archive

He calls them secrets as though there is some small pleasure in protecting them. As though there is additional joy in their leakage, shimmying from his mouth as we lie in the moist shade. A wet history falls off his bottom lip, trauma like a tongue in my ear. “This is between you and I,” he says, and I nod because it’s the only way I’d want it. Like the easier stories, the color of his socks or details regarding his breakfast, I hold these words too like a white envelope in my sweaty hand. Vibrating against my eardrum, laying eggs in the canal, these stories will be a caviar of sound and recollection.

Explain again why birth is a beginning. Pregnancy slows the body, prepares it to serve. He too struggles to birth, half-tales bookmarked for eventual completion. He nods when he can’t finish, and I nod back Yes, Yes, You’re Audible.

In the grass that day, I fall in love with him, threading tiny white flowers through his earrings, leaving them to dangle like chimes. I decide against bursting the caviar, pressing against the molar. Saving them from stillborn hatching, an unneeded liberation of organs. Or I could wait with a tiny mother-of-pearl spoon and say, “put your problems in my orifices, with the other things waiting to die there.” I find no pleasure in keeping secrets, just an absence of that same old ache. His body as caviar, soft innards untouched by air, the biting of which compromises its structure.

At night, I dream of consuming the hurt like hot bread, melting against my gums. I choke, but the right maneuver doesn’t arrive. He never wanted my mouth, at least not for this.

IV. Habitus and the Essential Form

Perhaps, if I could locate the essence on my body, there wouldn’t be such trouble. A hundred phone calls to the provider, rejections, partial answers exchanged for yeses. Re-exchanged for nos. In tantrum, the limbs are mine but the motions are borrowed. We followed the handbook, told the story, went to counseling, got the letters in white envelopes licked shut with hope, we told the stupid story again, made the appointments, the phone calls, did everything. We lived as men. We told the stupid fucking story one more time. And denial stings like vinegar in the wound. The story becomes true. Like scratching the imaginary scab.

It comes down to a simple absurdity: I am fighting for my right as a consumer to buy a new body. Some traits are more easily acquired than others. Likeness seeps into the skin, divides bodies like cells; nothing lost, all gained. Endless variation, infinite iteration. Communal genetics. (Queers make science unreal.) Have I lost faith in social magic? By seeking to acquire the scalpel, to be cut open and repaired, to watch the skin heal into someone else’s body— habitus defunct. And besides, what is insurance anyway? What does “coverage” mean and why is it so hard to find?

The fleshy roots are invisible, which is not to say the body is without source. But where are the words? How to explain the beauty of his shifting form against the stillness, the glassy almost-stability of my own? Or the way in which anything feels right; “feeling,” contradictory to my knowledge of the process. All bodies are a process; all bodies are a process… informed by atmosphere, the pulse of others, the semi-permanence of language.

The essence precedes logic. The essence, falsely embedded in flesh, escapes you. The essence, polished by a story, escapes me.