Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Tonight I feel less lonely than last night. No, I’m not with friends nor am I in bed with a stranger. I don’t have a date this weekend. I’m walking in my immigrant neighborhood who has just come home from a long Monday at the shop or the factory, and is now feeding the children dinner, looks forward to a bit of TV, then hits the sack. It is a sweet exhaustion, and sweeter still, the man on the sidewalk who whistles to the girl leaning out from her bedroom window, and still sweeter, the men drinking, not one talking, in bars playing the salsa or the merengue, whose iron thighs have softened to hips. Plan for this poem-in-progress

No, I have lost in advance. I shall therefore voice my love. I now trust only in the beauty of my song (147). * I don't know much about Evil, but we must indeed have been angels to remain poised above our own crimes. The gravest insult among toughs--it is very often punished by death--is the word "cocksucker," and Bulkaen had chosen to be precisely what that vilest of words designates. He had even decided that it would be what was most personal, most precious in his life, since in prison he was first of all, before being a crasher, a pal, a "regular guy,"--and though he was all that--he was first of all "a guy who gives a blow-job." When you saw him, with his usual scowl of disgust, spit the words "little fag" at a jerk, you would never have thought that he himself was a chicken. Thus, there do exist fellows who voluntarily, and out of choice, are, in their heart of hearts, what is expressed by the most scurrilous insult, which they use to hu...

If you will not sleep with me, let’s talk about the soul. I think the soul is what the body imagines as its opposite. When the body feels like a cut flower, it imagines the soul a diamond. When the body drags like an animal, it imagines the soul air. This is probably false but certainly more benevolent than thinking of them as opponents— the body as a threshing floor for the soul’s harvest, or the soul an interrogator of the body’s secrets. Some question the idea of a soul, or the need, They are usually naïve materialists and I confess I’ve said one or two things, in the past, that sounded like their creed, but tonight I prefer to think of the soul as the finest sensations of the body, not just an idea but the poem of its height, length and breadth, the first kiss, the finger-nails, on which the body contemplates its death. Plan for this poem-in-progress

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An enema is not an enigma for the constipated or the finicky. The careful scholar knows its etymology (“injection,” from Greek), the costive lover its entry. The Fleet version comes in a twin pack, with Easy Squeeze technology. The pre-lubricated Comfortip slips into me. Why do I now think I need a monobasic sodium phosphate cleaning, you ask amusedly. I look at your sunburn, your hard hands, your hard cock, and say slowly, to be fucked by the bourgeoisie. Plan for this poem-in-progress

My friend M showed me her haiku on being dazzled by a mirror: sunlight blinds the sight flash off a polished surface golden circles float Trained by writing workshops to seek the specific as a sign of the real and of truth-telling, I asked her why she wrote sight , instead of eyes , and polished surface , instead of mirror . She said the eyes can see the mirror, or hubcap, or broad breast-front, only past the flash dazzled by the sun the eyes fail to see to see Plan for this poem-in-progress

How to begin to describe a book that is reading me rather than the other way round? In every cell of Fontevrault prison, in its stone yards, in the stairwell where Genet and Bulkaen talk, and then exchange their intimate letters, constrained life speaks to constrained life, criminal activities—burglary, prostitution, murder—are haloed with an aura simultaneously piercing and muted, more piercing than martyred arrows and more muted than monkish holiness. In the intensity of Genet’s vision, the chain of a condemned child-killer flowers into a garland, Harcamone is transfigured into Christ. Harcamone dropped his arms, and the chain hung in front of him, below his belt. He walked out of the cell. As sunflowers turn to the sun, our faces turned and our bodies pivoted without our even realizing that our immobility had been disturbed, and when he moved toward us, with short steps, like the women of 1910 in hobble skirts, or the way he himself danced the Java, we felt a temptation to kneel or ...

That Beauty has a body is something all horny boys know. Sore in reading rooms, I pored over Greek vases, Roman stone, Renaissance masterpieces in flesh tones, sought the god and fell for him in film. As Ripley, Matt marks, fucks and kills young men in Italy. He wants to live like them— frescoed villas, grapes, fragile women, jazz weekend in Capri— to flower in the stones of Venice, to live. Desire selects him: the blond hair, blue eyes, boy-next-door breed. Most masculine flower, the tulip curves in classic line, raises a pedestal crowned with stigma-lips and slips to a bulb, round and hard as nut. I read the other day curators had to dry semen splashed between the tulip-thighs of the Berberini faun (daemonic stone!). The wanker must have been pockmarked and poor, having blown it all on a budget tour. Plan for this poem-in-progress

His back is bent like an elbow, except the spine has no socket. A clothes hanger thrust in the back of a beige coat with no pocket. Plan for this poem-in-progress

My first Brathwaite read, The Zea Mexican Diary records the author's responses to the death of his wife from cancer. The diary includes "nine extracts from a diary Kamau Brathwaite started when he learned that his wife was terminally ill, nine extracts from letters he wrote to his sister Mary Morgan in an attempt to open lines of communication across the breach created by Doris's suffering and death, a statement written by the author on the night of her death and read at her Thanksgiving service by Edward Baugh, and a letter written by Ayama, which is interwoven with the author's meditations on the words and the Thanksgiving service that ocassioed them" (Foreword, by Sandra Pouchet Paquet). Doris Monica seemed to have given her life to supporting Brathwaite's scholarship and poetry. Before she died, she completed a bibliography of B's works, and B was editing that bibliography on the night of her death, and so was absent from the end. In the most moving s...

The sports-watch you left in my room two Sundays ago beeped every five minutes. I pressed all its buttons and it stopped. Then it beeped again. In the same manner your wrist pulsed in my memory's thumb as I masturbated my trick B in the dance club’s church belfry; pulsed; stopped; then it pulsed again in the same manner as the gun that kept going off at Virginia Tech, stopped to scan a room, swagger to the next, or think a crazy thought, then it kept going, with this one difference that your watch, an intricate piece of electronics, for no reason to do with me, stopped beeping finally. Plan for this poem-in-progress

At the Easter vigil in St. Luke-in-the-Field, where my friend Y was to be confirmed, I saw for the first time in my life more men than women in a church. A gay-friendly church. As in children-welcoming. Or dogs-permitting. Yes, I am hostile to the Church. It wasn’t always like this. Two years ago, when Y was getting baptized, the music was soft as feathers and powerful as wings, and carried back a young man yearning to die and rise again. No young man came up to my pew in St. Luke. So I punished him. How could you have loved God who killed by water, stuffing noses, mouths and lungs? How could you have trusted God who saved the Jews and drowned the Egyptians, then sided with the Christians against the Jews, then beheaded Catholics for not being Protestants? I did not stay for the Eucharist. I did not talk to my friend Y. My missing young man frightens me for I know he lurks, perhaps round the corner of the church. Plan for this poem-in-progress

The novel is a Proustian endeavor to remember a lost passion. Adolescent Elio falls in love with the young scholar, Oliver, a summer guest at his parents’ home on the Italian Riviera, and eventually finds Oliver returning his passion. The end of summer dictates the end of the relationship and, after a final fling in Rome, Oliver returns to the States, marries and has two children. I think the middle and last parts of the novel are stronger than the first. In the first, the other characters, such as Elio’s parents, never really come into focus. The use of Oliver’s customary curt reply “Later!” as a kind of leitmotif, perhaps modeled on Vinteuil’s musical phrase in Proust, becomes a little tiresome. The parry-and-thrust of flirtation and courtship is not particularly original. In the last part, the description of a book launch party in Rome, and the characters that flock to the event, is rich and deft. We see the author, a Poet, hungry for praise and hiding that hunger in vain. We see th...

No, you are not the heart, at least, not yet, not vital. You are not the gluteus maximus or the gluteus medius or the muscle in the forehead that contracts the scalp. No. You are the arm that wraps round my shoulder and presses me to your chest. You are the strong upper arm that belts my bottom and makes me beg, No . Meaning yes. When I wrestle you down, we become an arm. Let me be more exact. I become the bicep curl, you the tricep extension, reaching out to act. Plan for this poem-in-progress

In The Joy of Gay Sex , by Dr. Charles Silverstein and Felice Picano, fully revised and expanded 3rd edition, the list of entries begins with Anus and ends with Wrestling, which seems to invert the order of things. Like Whitman, the authors celebrate Hair, Hands, Nipples, Cocksize, Buns, and Feet, and, unlike Whitman, Foreskin. Beyond Touching and Holding, they explain Sixty-Nining, Rimming and Felching, and Sex with Straight Men. And against the Bard’s lonely conception of the Comrade, Silverstein-Picano embraces Fuck Buddies, Hustlers, Domestic Partnerships, Tops, Mixed HIV Couples, Friends and Daddy/Son Fantasies. The poetry? Would you get off on “Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love” or laugh? His poetic successors: “three to seven spurts of fluid at 0.8-second interval.” Plan for this poem-in-progress

I realize today I’ve never seriously doubted I will win love, fame and happiness, despite starting late in the race for a man’s love, the race for poetic fame, and the race for earthly happiness. Triple steeplechase. I am a favored son and so, in love’s racetrack, run in my favorite lane. In chasing fame, I am a workhorse, and a workhorse must have its day. And I have sewn up the race for earthly happiness, for I relish the taste of wind on my sweaty flank, the tug of rein, the nudge of thighs, blood’s excitement and everyday, so when I pass the finishing post, I’m ready to be led to water and hay. Plan for this poem-in-progress

My favorite image for the body is the river and the rower on the river. I am in bed touching me. Strong river. Strong rower. Emptying into the sea. Plan for this poem-in-progress

I visited the Tibor de Nagy Gallery for the first time today to view what TimeOUT magazine called the “minimasterpieces” of American artist, Joe Brainard (1942-94). The works, mostly collages, are small, many of which are about the size of playing cards. Playing cards appear as a motif in the exhibited works, as well as roses, butterflies, matchbooks, and hearts. I did not care very much for the drawings of the male torso tattooed with roses, doves, anchors, names of lovers and of poets Brainard, a poet himself, loved. The drawings are decidedly off-hand, and formally uninteresting. Some of the collages are banal. In one collage of a male nude, a pear take the place of the scrotum and the word HEINZ stretches over the shaft of the penis. Perhaps it is a jokey reference to Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, but the joke just makes one groan. A series of collages, “Homage to Keith,” begins provocatively with his lover’s pubic hair and semen but quickly turns into a collection of clichés: a va...

Cyril sent me the link to his recording, and I like it so much that I am posting here his link and comment. Enjoy. I recorded LAY A GARLAND, an 8-part choral piece that I have loved for a long time. I sang all 8 parts and this was the result. The pitching wavers at parts, so I apologise in advance. But I cannot describe why this work moves me so much. Just click here . The lyrics come from the 1610 play The Maid's Tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher. Lay a garland on my hearse, Of the dismal yew, Maidens, willow branches bear, Say I died true. My love was false, but I was firm From my hour of birth; Upon my buried body lie Lightly, gentle earth.

I just heard from Tim Monaghan, publisher of The Ledge Magazine & Press, that he's nominating my poem "Brother" for the 2007 Best New Poets anthology, published by Meridian Press. Only poets who have not yet published a book-length collection of poems are eligible for nomination. Now that's a piece of encouraging news! Do check out The Ledge Magazine online.

At Splash Bar on Moulin Rouge Night, it is easy to believe that gender is a performance when drag queens fight tooth and nail for the prize of $200. Big hair, outsized breasts, cocks strapped down, they sing and dance and make us cheer for the acrobatic siren, the hip-hop princess, the soul diva, the mousy schoolmarm. The school-spinster often takes the prize. The audience likes self-reflexive parodies. But when I listen to my friend G, a transgendered activist, play the Goldberg aria, each note crying at the passing of the one before, and at the birth of the next, it is hard to believe she is not a woman. Plan for this poem-in-progress

Names are directions, for instance, right hand, back of the head, inner thigh, but where does neck-slue point to? Worse, there are no fingerposts to the point where the small of the back divides into butt-cheeks, or to any point on their vast, smooth and firm terrain. Like an astronomer, I could name the features I observe through powerful lenses or advanced techniques, but I prefer to bounce on them and boast like an astronaut: this pimple shall be known as the Hill-By-Which-Passion-Navigates, this birth-stain Lake Pleasant, and this steep-sided fall between the cheeks the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Plan for this poem-in-progress

Should I ask him after dinner tonight at the best Thai restaurant in the city if he would like to walk back to my place and fuck me, though I know my friend T is positive? There is no cocktail of drugs for this knowledge, this fear infecting my body, this fear of the infected body no knowledge of virus or precaution can cure. Flush the meds down the toilet. Passion is an appetite. Who stops eating jungle curry, steamed pomfret, beef sautéed with chili and lemongrass, for fear of choking? Plan for this poem-in-progress

When I was committed to military service, I learned the forehead, temples, flanks and back of the skull cap are made for gripping a steel helmet in place, and the chin is made for a chin-strap; I learned the elbows are bipods for a semi-automatic rifle, the hollow between deltoid and breast is a cushion for the wooden butt and its sharp rebuke, and the eye sees accurately through the rifle sight; and, if you are right handed, your left hand is a flat support for the hand-guard, and the pointer of your right hand curls round the trigger snugly. When I was committed to military service, I learned the body is not a book to be read discriminately but a weapon to be finely calibrated, and fired while holding my breath. Plan for this poem-in-progress

It is time to bring your face into focus before this lens moves below the chin to other features harder to identify as yours. The best image is that of the cheeks. The right cheek and the left cheek do not meet. Like the back of the hand and the palm, like the head of a silver coin and its tail, the cheeks do not see each other except in a mirror or a photograph. This was true of my cheeks until my right brushed your left when we danced and, in that flash of flesh, the coin turned up both head and tail, the back of the hand shook hands with the palm. Plan for this poem-in-progress

Consider the nostrils. Why two of them above the mouth? Why the partition, growing hair and watered by snot, when both plots are seeded by winds blowing north, or south? Plan for this poem-in-progress

The nose is the clown of the body. In the center of the ring of the face the nose runs on the spot, tickles, blows its cracked cornet, and turns an embarrassing tint of red. If from very high up, say, a trapeze platform, you look down on the ringmaster’s head, his nose sticks out like a knee, not anything like the capable hand of an elephant, nor the quivering compass-needle of the lion scenting blood bounding, bounding away. The nose twitches in honor of its shrew-like ancestor instead; and when the body gets too big for its breeches, the nose snorts at its top hat, punches the head backwards, and sneezes. Plan for this poem-in-progress

From this poem on I forswear talking about the body as if it is a house for the soul— with windows for eyes and walls for the skin of cells— or a cathedral or a cave, as if the body is a container for something finer. There is nothing finer than the body of the woman who drew the first bison on the walls of the cave, or the body of the man bent over his cruciform plan for the cathedral, or the body of the child who drew away from companions playing tag in the meadow and wandered down a narrow trail to the lake and dreamt of a house floating on a great flood that covered all the earth, and so I will not compare the jaws to doors swinging on hinges, or the top of the mouth to a roof. When my imagination fails me, I’ll name the body plainly by its name. Plan for this poem-in-progress

I read Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay" again yesterday, and enjoyed it immensely for its narrative maneuvers and literary musings, although Guy Davenport, in his introduction, exaggerates when he says that it is a poem "richer than most novels nowadays." His comment either means something, in which case it is patently false since Carson's poem does not aim at novelistic detail, or it means nothing, playing it safe with that qualifier "most." "The Glass Essay" tells two intertwined stories: the abandonment by a lover, and the suffering of a father from Alzheimer's. Presiding over the stories is the tutelary spirit of Emily Bronte, loveless, unloved. The language of the poem is deliberately unlyrical; some may even call it prosy. Here's the opening of the section titled "Three": Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed wi...

After clubbing the night away, you brought breakfast, sausage and egg on whole-wheat bagel. We stayed in bed the whole day, kissing, dozing, talking, touching on men far away from my room, yet here in bed with us. It was your second time in my bed. It was a Sunday. A friend, let’s call him X, once said, choosing love is not like choosing a college. What he means is love’s offers don’t all arrive at the same time. We don’t choose between possibilities, but between love and loneliness. It is not immediately obvious which is better. Love is young and passionate, like a college freshman, then he graduates to duty and settles down to will. Loneliness—we are all students of loneliness. And in the book of loneliness, which is also the book of the body, I have seen the lineaments of Beauty through a glass of cheap house wine, I have seen dark-beat music pound against the cliff of his body, and prove his permanence, I have gone back night after night to find what I have lost, and walked the gar...

It is common knowledge that dogs hang out their tongues to cool down, that salamanders shoot out a finger to hook their prey, and mollusks grind food on theirs, a rough tongue called a radula. If the human body is a book, our tongue is a language. I could sing of my tongue in a lyric, praise it from its tip to its root, reveling in its marvelous muscles before revealing its shortcoming in a well-turned climax, a kind of masturbation (read the ear and eye poems); I could give you a story about a boy who held his tongue until he jumped his first man, and could not stop licking him, then you would give me your story, and we would compare notes (turn to the neck poem); Or I could re-tell a myth about the tongue, the rape of Philomela or some fable about the salamander, changing a little but keeping the familiar elements, and explain the nature of the world (look under “arm-pit”); but my tongue is rough, like a radula, and here’s my diagnosis: the tongue tip, a holograph of the heart, is in...

Lacking opposable thumbs, many mammals use their mouth as a third hand. You and I own such improved thumbs but still grab at the world with our mouth, gourmet, orator, lover, and so the mouth must stand for greed. Not only for truffle, puffer fish and wine, but also rice, maize, barley, corn, peanuts, cocoa beans, tea leaves, sunflower seeds on commodity markets, and perishables like pineapples, dragonfruit, raspberries and mangos; not only edible things, but also what’s inedible: rubber and cotton from plants, dyes and shells from the sea, from animals mink, pelt, skin, spines, hair, blubber, feathers, and teeth, the long, beautiful teeth of the Indian and the African elephants; not only the living, survivors and victors of natural selection, but from those long dead and long gone underground, their forms compressed and thus transformed, oil and gas; not only life but also what has never lived: diamonds; not only in lodes of rock but also in air galvanized by lightning; not only natur...

At the time of the book's publication in 1977, Rowse was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, as well as the British Academy, according to the back cover. Subtitling his book, A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts , he aimed to "throw some light on the predisposing conditions to creativeness, in the psychological rewards of ambivalence, the doubled response to life, the sharpening of perception, the tensions that lead to achievement" (from the Preface). To my mind, his study of the relationship between sexual ambivalence and creativity is not a systematic, or even a methodical, one. Instead the book offers biographical sketches of famous, and less well-known, homosexual or bisexual male artists, politicians and society figures, the best of whom receive his highest term of praise, "a man of genius." The selection is Eurocentric and phallocentric. The tone swings from defensive (The Preface begins, "This book is decidedly not...

In my more primitive moments, I wish I am a snail and with my ocelli distinguish between light and dark, between shriveling sunlight and moist dark, and no more. No shapes like a loop of rope swinging from a tree, twelve bamboo fingers pinching fingers of flesh and bone, iron-jawed pliers, grinning crocodile clips, hypodermic needle, automatic rifles, basin, doorknob, chair or window. If I were a snail, I won't see colors either. Veins bulging in forehead. Cigarette burns. Bruises. Lips dropping their cherry. Charred bodies. Not even the soil, freshly dug, my body slides over. But I am not a snail. I have eyes perfect for me: cone cells for reading music, watching birds, and shooting rapids; rod cells for looking aslant at the stars; eye-fringes; iris of the eye; eye-brows; and the waking or sleeping of the lids. Plan for this poem-in-progress

When your body aches to speak, my body becomes an ear, my skin the tympanic membrane, my bones the hammer on the anvil on the stirrup, my organs the cochlea, all nerves firing to my brain. How strange is your accent. Speak slowly that I may hear you as well as I see. The ear's vestibule? My heart, of course, keeps me balanced and attuned to gravity. Plan for this poem-in-process.

Under the hot shower, as I shave my groin, my balls and cock, to get ready for a good time with men who like men smooth, I remember what the book of the body says about haircuts as a means of control in the police and other armed forces. My head knows this: it was shaved at eighteen for national service, the body clapped into uniform and marched lock-step with other stiff uniforms, pillories of shaved heads and limbs. So are the hands shaving my pubes mine or a policeman's? The book of the body discusses beauty under three headings: Aesthetics, Politics, and Self-Help. Self-Help, a manicurist's voice from a gym trainer's body, says, the hand is yours , and from the counter offers a discount on hope. Your oppressor's , rallies Politics. Remember the women who bound and crushed other women's feet. Remember Anorexia . Aesthetics, examining through a monocle Greek statues of women and their hairless fork, an ideal learned from the Egyptians who in turn got it from the s...

Tenuous connection, the neck. Muscles hooked up like cuts of meat in market stalls. Climbing vines of arteries and jugular veins, and pods of thyroid and parotid glands. The seven segments of the cervical spine (C-1 to C-7) glued by cartilage. When I was fifteen, I broke a chicken's neck. At backwoods camp, my scouts watching me, for no one else would do it, I grabbed the hen by the neck (tubular like a stethoscope) and, in the way taught, swung it round and, with a wrist-flick, snapped it to the ground. The hen got up, squawked, scrabbled in widening circles, and shat. I grabbed it again and this time did my job as a patrol leader should. Someone else defeathered the bird in boiling water. We baked it in mud, ate it with salt, and pronounced it good. Plan for this poem-in-progress.

Today I open the book of the body and read about beheadings. It took three strokes to hack off Mary Stuart's head, the first struck the back of her head, the second bit her shoulder and through her subclavian artery, spraying blood like a garden hose, the third did the job. Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur, who warned, the mind remains in the mind and so death seizes him by the hair, was decapitated for refusing to convert. The book says that at his wedding Tegh Bahadur's face was handsome as the moon. The heads of looters stuck on poles outside Singapore's Shaw Cinema where Japanese officers manned the radio and watched American movies broadcast the same message as the execution of Daniel Pearl, and those of others who did not make it to video. If the head was taken away, how did they identify the body for burial? Perhaps the mother claimed her daughter by the birthmark on her left buttock. Perhaps the father asked for his flat-footed son. Perhaps the disciples placed his palm on th...