Delphinium a gay garden May 2000 (revisited)

Delphinium ~ a gay garden, revisited
May 2000

‘Till the shadows
on his past
In a separate garden.

Except that we were
laughing
they too
were full silhouettes

in bloom

& not to bother

to intrude on mindless
heads thrown back for
That late brunch
sun mocking itself
meanwhile
a frond noir
Tricking the eye into
Thinking that it is

reseeing a day of youth
the shade of shadows
in shadows
we don’t really remember
even 20 years ago before

the last fall
When everyone was
subsumed
vortex
justanothermonster
million-rooted blood hydra
just another monster
to be melted

who were we but
all of us

to be still here

on this day buried
behind black purple
Siberian irises
splashed with cheap mimosas
or aubergine

sweated morning glories
all flora

staying out for a long
nevermore luxuriant

Lurching
fox gloves
slap each

other with tired lilies
forgetting a century
of black Pagliaci tears)

Spilled over lips
With winds swirls
making us blink vs
red or violet afterburns
to champagne
pink fade
blades
running
once,
leaves of grass
swat and sway
all afternoon
Trying to dance against
the lazy chorus of chive hammers
the entrada of
blurviolet organza
brushing by
Spiked feathers
Tripped over bowl of clover
Whispered over
villainous amaryllis

accidental
camaraderie
loitering
With such beautiful intent

Snapdragons in
snarky venereal poses
Under arc of skid row
rails repopulated with lilac clematis
(ear-ringed, dreadlocked)
And Camille

ignores

enough to
Descend.
On neon Medusa

granite dragon
ignored
unbloomed with doubt
certain of the galaxy
chrysanthemum
if it survives
Root map of the ants
cotillion next door to
The red speck-flies
Amok on mauve silk belles
willow

spiraled in
gnarled beauty
because of the early heat
and forget-me-nots
lost on other endless afternoons
the amber showdown
vaporized our outfits
reassemble from last
night
unforced bloomed
in the twilight

of blue roses
we’ve never

knew the worse

The lovers gone
Friends silenced
out of the
heroic sea
of unwanted souls
What we
were once
& need to be again
Will always be

kept like the
Ghosts of the gardens at Versailles.
Those forgotten blooms
still lost in someone else’s time

no we did not
remember promises not to
fall in love
Have sex
Not to cheat on our lovers
Or press leaves between
The pages of the pact that
We are finally
loving witness for each other
that is our sanctified root
the perpetual motion

on this last day

So the light changed
there is laughter
same larkspur
flying out of Troy
To drown out
cry for the next rain
soaring in this
dank metropolis
so supple
so fetid sometimes
she soars
in the field of
Delphinium

So instead do not
turn our back
On the blinded warriors
going back in
to say goodbye
unforeshadowed

Queens of the Garden

(For Jack & those beautiful men gathered

May 2000)

 

 

annual revisit & some replanting to Delphinium, A Gay Garden

Poetics

splotch

(photo by Jan Carroll)

Delphinium ~ a gay garden, revisited
May 2000

‘Till the shadows
on his past
In a separate garden.

Except that we were
laughing
They couldn’t have cared less
Not to check mindless
Blooms.
Throwing our heads back for
The last Brunch
The sun mocking itself
meanwhile
frond noir
Tricking the eye into
Thinking that it is

~reseeing a day of youth
the shade in shadows
in shadows
we don’t really remember
30 years ago before the last fall
When everyone was
subsumed
million-rooted blood hydra
just another monster
to be melted
on this day buried
behind black purple
Siberian irises
splashed with cheap mimosas
aubergine morning glories
all flora staying out for a long
morning luxuriant

Lurching
fox gloves
slap each other with lilies
forgetting a century
(cream laced with black Pagliaci tears)
Spilt over lips
With winds swirls
making us blink vs,
red or violet afterburns
a lace pink fade

blade swat and sway
before noon
Trying to dance against
the lazy chorus of chive hammers
In blur organza
brushing by
Spiked feathers
Tripping over bowl of clover
Whisper over
villainous amaryllis
loitering
With intent

Snapdragons in
Venereal poses
shaded
Under arc of skid row
rails repopulated with lilac clematis
(ear-ringed, dreadlocked)
As the
Ladies of the Nellie Mosers,
Descend.
On neon Medusa

sundial
Stare
granite dragon
ignored
unbloomed with doubt
certain of never

galaxy seeding
chrysanthemum
if it survives
Root map of the ants
cotillion next door to
The red speck-flies
Amok on mauve silk belles
willow spiraled in
gnarled beauty
because of the early heat
and forget-me-nots
lost on other endless afternoons
the amber showdown
vaporized our outfits
reassemble from last
night,
forced bloomed
to thought
and wry composition
the limpness
with immediate history
we’ve never looked worse

The lovers gone
Friends silenced
from ultimately
out of the
heroic era
of Unheralded souls
What we
were once
& need to be again
Will always be the
Ghosts of the gardens at Versailles.
Those forgotten blooms
still perennially lost

no we did not
remember promises not to
fall in love
Have sex
Not to cheat on our lovers
Or press leaves between
The pages of the unsigned pact that
We are finally
loving witness for each other
and that is a sanctified root
the perpetual motion

So the light changed
there is laughter
The same larkspur
flying out of Troy
To drown out
the next rain
soaring in this
dank metropolis
so supple
so fetid sometimes
it wanders
in the field of
Delphinium

So instead do not
turn our back
On the blinded warrior
going back in
to say goodbye
unforeshadowed
Queen of the Garden

Booksbooksbooks

Who’s Yer Daddy? 
Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco shaking hands with the President (photo: RichardBlanco)

Terrace Books | http://uwpress.wisc.edu
Hardcover, $26.95, e-book $16.95

Jim Elledge and David Groff, the editors of Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners note in their introduction that some contributors had bristled at the bawdy implications of its title and explained that they chose it for a sense of fun and for those offended few to focus on the subtitle.

The book appears almost a year after Christopher Bram’s vital history Eminent Outlaws, which tracks the gay male writers who busted open the literary closet vis-à-vis the post-WWII gay civil rights movement. This anthology is a great companion volume.

39 authors weigh in on their “daddy’s” from the semi-closeted world of Walt Whitman, Thomas Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and Truman Capote through The Violet Quill revolution and the era of out-and-proud gay writers. Some influencers and mentors are not gay men. Richard Blanco, President Obama’s inaugural poet weighed in with Making a Man Out of Me, an essay about his grandmother as his main literary influence by trying to butch Blanco up. Her harshness drove Blanco to escape in his literary world that would validate his dream of being a gay writer.

Just as present in these essays, are straight men and women, as well as GLBTQ icons Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, among others, are cited by several of their gay male literary decedents.

Stage artist-writer Tim Miller’s Jumpstart ruminates on having the literary DNA from Nijinsky to Allen Ginsberg and everybody in between. Meanwhile his longtime husband (unofficially) Australian writer Alistair McCartney’s essay Teenage Riot charts his booky puppy love with Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde and Jean-Paul Sartre, among other usual suspects.

Kenny Fries’ How I Learned to Drive, The Educations of a Gay Disabled writer is a condensed, but no less moving account of Fries connecting with other writers, notably his 20 year friendship with poet Adrienne Rich, facing the prejudices and isolation of writers with disabilities. Like many of these essays, you hope the author considers expanding to memoir. so compelling , writes of being isolated as a disabled American and his connection to the poetry of Adrienne Rich, connecting him to his brethren of writers facing the same hostile and disconnected world.

The pre-Stonewall stars icons are present (including Judy). Editor Groff threading the ballsy camp of Bette Midler as an invaluable literary persona in the same essay as he writes of the towering elegies of Paul Monette’s ‘Love, Alone’ particularly his poem ‘Buckley’, where he eviscerates William F. Buckley’s diatribe that called for tattooing PWAs as diseased humans. Indeed, a repeated theme in the essays is the profound impact of the AIDS era.

“There was a lot of work being done in the gay community to heal the pain of AIDS and how it affected us.” Noël Alumet (author of Letters to Montgomery Clift) states in Vanity Fairey Interviews sites everyone from Shel Silverstein’s children’s classic The Learning Tree to Arnie Kantrowitz’s Under the Rainbow as literary passions.

The universal theme of reconciled loss is an eloquent, quiet theme through many of these essays. Saeed Jones’ hauntingly poetic Orpheus in Texas is a memoir of a father he never knew, but presence he still feels. The raw emotional loss poetically told through the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the Texas landscape with the coda “Well aware that this rejection may be my equivalent of looking over my shoulder and trying to ask loss one more question.”

Brian Leung’s tremulously fab of The Seismology of Love and Letters tracks his stability handling earthquakes in San Diego, but growing up Chinese-American he sought the comfort of Edmund White and Elizabeth Bishop, when it came to earth shattering gay romance. As a budding writer he was told that he wasn’t gay or Chinese enough. By the time the earth shifts everyday at the height of the AIDS era, he is an artist chronicling his times- powerfully, poetically and on solid ground.

This anthology is a joyous, unexpected book, so full of drama, comedy and lessons learned. The landscape of gay literati that is connected vitally to personal liberation as the beautiful open rooms of the every expanding GLBTQ library.

Poems’ continuo

Gyroscope – log 7.4.2012

The solid structure of the universe ends in a beamshadeless and prismatic a distance congruent to the mind somewhat of a fantasyParticular to the mantouching the seaward time

Rended dark
Those dogged
Indefatigable
Bio-scientists
Digdigdig
prove
That proof is
Proof and dig
Some more
Research till their
Eyes fall out
quantum
Archeologist
Question to question
Quotient ferret
Shadow in shadow
In shadow to
Negative fields
They discovered
The god particle
Short for ‘Where’s that
Goddamn particle’
But that had to be made
Safe for cereal boxes
The Higgs boson particle
Sees the universe
Or Van Gogh dreams
in the flawed iris
Threatens to bust
Up the whole
Murder of cardinals
Off their vacation reading
Not to mention Sunday
programming
But in this moment
There is sudden
Stillness
A aria to the
chaos of
Infinite ifs
And its
Silence before
Any action is
Realized into
Motions of
Knowable codes
Turned into
Galleries or the
Act of light
Over the burst
Fountain of
Mercury in eternal flight

poem comique

from Chet plays the Mercury L

Genet murmurs

Foggy nights and cigarettes
3 pm on the boulevard avec
Heavy rain
Paint buildings in
Mutable translucence
Strolling in my dead lover’s old
Vietnam War P-coat
And pewter-cleat boots
Listening to Shirley Horn
singing Wild is the Wind
In my head
Cruise outside the diver’s dream diver bar
where the smoke is blue
So hooded eyes
Glisten and vanish.
Drinking in silhouettes
Against the slashed shadows.
Is there such haunted lyres
That make you move on
Crowded out
And why does it remind of
Half remembered
Dreams from infancy
A cryptic emotion
And I hear their
Whispers not to me but
Like gods in another time
Borders of their flesh
Mingle in eternity
Apparently because there is
No known record
Aside from this dream
Of the cells
And they usher me to
Sleep forever until my hour
Of previous dreams
Seen again,
We finally
We dream
We wake again
We fuck
We drink
We smoke hash
We fuck
We kiss
They sleep
I read
They go
I sleep
I read
And read and read
I find the cigarettes they’ve
Left.
I finally sleep
Until the next night.

Poem Comique

From
Fausto {the disgusting details and revolting portrait of an artist in heat circa 1962}

Fuck
I don’t want to know
what I know
The entire troupe is
Waiting for me,
Actually the other me and
He just couldn’t get out of
Bed.

My toes woke up first
Because they were
Curling the hair of
One of the dance boys
I picked up last night.
I peeked up and saw
My feet and three heads

Fuck him, they started
To say after they had
Gone through the fake
Worrying
Christoph came in late
And heard the noise
‘Oh Fausto? Nothing
happened
he picked up
Four guys on the
dancefloor at Dante’s last
Night and
He was cut of by choruses of
FUCK HIM
They are cursing me
And really they should be
Because I don’t have a
Thought in my head except
How to fuck and get rid
Of these three fig trees
In my bed.

Well when you fuck
Him you get fucked
Someone said
You know he writes
Poetry and he tries to recite
It during sex
All together now
FUCCCCCKKKHIIIIIII…

…well really I can’t
Hate myself even when
I hate myself because
I have to create and deal
With everybody and everything else
It’s a dream of life
That I once had
A living dream someone
Deserves, but perhaps not me
At this moment
But there it is.

Divertissement 1-

If then we are
If then
You made the
Rotting boards under
Our bed fall apart
Even and
We seemed to wallow in that
Dilapidation more
As time went by
The wetness and
Chantilly lace vestment
Laying over broken
Furniture
An offering
Cobalt accoutrement
Is just a shadow
Over the core of your
Being
An offering at this
Altar of lust
And I looked between
Your eyes into
This palace and
I’d press your
Shoulders with
My feet like I was
Penetrating the
the putrid beauty of
Heavenly Earth. I should hang out
At this end of the bed
More often, but I don’t feel
Anything. Oh Christ,
They are standing over
Me like Jason and
The fucking Argonauts
I can hear
What they are thinking.

The troupe breaks into
A chorus

Fuck him, Fuck him, Fuck him
Why would anybody
Go out with him
-Stays in with him you mean
-Well he’s great for the arts
Well is he really or has
He how shall we say it
Climaxed and it is all
Cleaning up the mess.
Fausto, rot in hell!

Tender apostles
With thy hand
Protect my journey
Light under thine steps
Invisible returns
The water at thy temples
Streaks off thy wings
Have heart
Sign infinity
En l’ air

Virgin foot
Aloft over carnage
passing the silence
Of the souls
Thigh not posed, really
To rest
Not doomed
Deity
excuent

‘Call the soul
Send forth
So you
Shall be redeemed
Fool thine gods
Not to be
Reap in nature’s
Love
Disengage’

Ok fellas, you can leave.

Poetry

from ‘Gyroscopes’

I’d like a break from

compulsions of idealism

and religious psychosis

I’ve seen pictures of

real stars exploding,

They confirm the spatial illusion

the time inverted reality

Holy vaudeville cast with

self fulfilled prophesies

I’d like to know what

they confirm in the algebraic brain

a scratchy infinite equation

leading to lost and partial quotants.

four billion years

to know what it is I seek.

Now, seeing the upside

down line of your lost silhouette

it only seems probable to

lay next your soul to challenge the universe

to its cyclonic fragmentation

An uncharted moment

lost to all but us.

more from The Reading

Law
| spirit card 11 ‘

I am the one who is called justice

and I am gross iniquity

The   goddess Kore

granite soul deity

Balances a sword

Unseen

13 dismembered eyes

Witness her

Authority.

You have judged

yourself wrongly

 in a false moment

That will now live.

Erozolie | six of water

The face of the sun

Reflects to the face of

The moon in the

Hidden oasis

Masculine and feminine sound

Waves radiate between

Earth air fire

The spirit abides

To water

Dvlie | spirit card 15

I am the slave of him who prepareth me’

On papyrus Gnostic text

Squat flush dervish is

In a severed firmament

The wings erect

The tongue livid

The penis recoiled

The nipples oozing

It holds two lifeless voodoo dolls

Transformed from wasted

Souls of the doomed

The talisman

Holds mutilated dolls

shadows putrid sepulchers

May or may not return

To life

Poetry

In August, Shadow of Janus by LW 

performed by Marcie Sillman

Marcie is a producer, writer and reporter in Seattle. You can hear her feature stories and arts commentary on Seattle Public Radio and streamed online at KUOW.org

for Jack Anthony Nespoli

 

LsOTD

“Nobody is talking about some government takeover of health care, I’m tired of hearing that.” President Obama told a wildly supportive crowd in Durham, NC.  The President fired back at critics who just will say anything to obstruct health care reform. “I’ve been as clear as I can be; under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,…If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. These folks need to stop scaring everybody.”  Obama said.