Our Disembodied Second Selves
the bed is soaked in sweat again 3am: we have to change the sheets and blankets/ both of us burning from a fever/ is this real the 15-year-old wonders/ yes: i tell him/ the bed is soaked in sweat again/ drenched in sustiva nightmares/ sailing through the vast agean/ whose gorges unexplored since that last dawn of waiting for both of us to die/ has washed my sun with a tongue of redstained torn/ unwrap us suicidal with the blind/ throwing the wet sheets that smell of us pasted together with cum and scissors/ my bandages having leaked blood again/ what abortion has been performed here masturbating on this bed/ lashing in the transatlantic sea/ a crow flies round and round the room/ is it real i wondered yes he said there is a crow flying round and round the room/ the shivering will commence/ even the blankets ancient in their violated sleep/ to make a nest of salt while sky/ o brief epic, despair darks the stain upon the face/ holes and holes and holes in gripping vague as a desert prophet/ swallowed up/ a bonfire inside my eyes/ crowned with my lover's bloody shoes/ the bed is soaked in sweat again/ the sheets are wrung with us/ i am quite beyond the exhausted horizons of any witch of sleep/ brainworms he has always been the younger dancer among us/ here overlooking the runways of our lives/ some virus hangs between us like an icon/ and you wonder why i left/ he came to me to apologize/ crawling into my bed/ everything is always his fault/ he hates himself/ it was quite late/ i hate it when they do that/ stay out of my bed/ they never listen/ i'm sorry he said the brainworms are bad tonight/ what do you mean brainworms/ i mean these worms inside my head/ crawling around in my blood/ boy, there is no such thing as worms inside anyone's head that crawl around in blood/ by now i was pissed off/ and wide awake/ you guys never let me sleep/ and you wonder why i left/ but i can see them in my eyes he said/ there are no brainworms in your eyes i told him/ but i am sorry the brainworms are killing me/ there are no brainworms in your head there is no such thing as a brainworm/ i see them he said/ brainworms/ whatthefuck/ maybe if you hug me they will go away, the brainworms/ i doubted it/ but i hugged him anyway/ what did i have to lose but another night of sleep/ the next day i took him to the clinic he has dementia they said/ on the way home he said i am sorry i have brainworms it is all my fault/ boy, what can we do to make the brainworms go away please tell me/ we can dance he said, when we dance they go away/ and so we danced the dances of dementia/ washing my body in the water of that war/ and you wonder why i left/ stop wondering/ hellbound/ looking through a lens/ whose curvature overthrows the light/ who is teaching who/ i never called myself anything but your friend/ and you could not handle that/ hellhound in yet another human shape/ attending to whoever does your bidding, boy/ solemn approbation, you looked askance at the magic spectacles/ darker rooms gone darker still/ for you, i would curate shows inside the eye/ windows wept/ the herculean rooms we lived in were empty but for you/ if there was excess, it would at least augment the fluidity/ distributing ordination oh lord of flies and and tangled troubles/ whirlwinds unraveled and all the broken windows wept/ i taught you how to dance/ but only you could do it in the leaves/
Brothers, he said, when they were walking stamina/ you talk about love but what you know is quid pro quo/ i am here to tell you whoreboy you know nothing of love/ i need you to punish me, you said/ why me when you do such a good job of it yourself, i said/ your stamina for punishment is ambidextrous/ hold on, both hands, your cum is the shibboleth/ your manifesto was set forth behind the gag/ whispers/ revelation/ disbelief/ the lion’s mane/ no one loves anyone/ your darkened eyes were right/
flyingboats/ people ask me why polaroids/ people are just stupid/ they’re looking for some mfa answer, is this a test/ i shrug/ the whir and the flyingboats, bitch/ n’importe/ for s/m scenes, you had to write to me/ snail mail/ i wanted to see your handwriting/ i wanted to know if you could actually articulate what you wanted/ most people have no fucking idea what they want/ you had to put the cash in the letter/ and the letter had to smell of leather/ here’s something most people do not believe but it happens to be true/ almost all of my s/m tricks were israeli soldiers/ officers/ they were HOT/ they flew into sfo/ all bottoms/ most of them had already cum in their pants before they rang the doorbell/ you see, it’s about the anticipation/ you had endured the long trip/ you had actually received a yes from me/ you had found me/ now, you were despondent/ i had a boxful of new underwear for them/ they would change/ then, we’d sit down and talk/ they would tell me all about their lives/ when they left, they hugged me hard/ people think it’s all hot and steamy sex/ sometimes it was/ but that was rare/ these guys had hard, hard bodies/ if you arrived and still wanted sex/ you were a control freak/ and I would remove every ounce of control you had ever had/ i would blindfold them and take their photographs with my polaroid/ i have thousands of these photographs/ they would hear the camera whir with that polaroid sound/ so they knew they were being photographed/ this is when they always began to sweat/ but i don’t want photographs/ what you want is of no importance here/ at this point, they never came in their pants/ they wet them/
flood marks flood marks/ even when they were turning tricks to survive/ there was always a vast chasm between the men who fucked them/ and who and what they were/ whores/ the stillborn and the objectified/ driving home the harvest/ being fucked without a condom/ like i said/ survival sex/ was always extra/ the tricks treated them as if they were a dime a dozen/ it isn’t true/ like many things, it’s a numbers game/ there are more tricks than treats/ more doom than responsibility/ their navigation was the steerage of a receptacle/ their cocks ejaculated maggots/ how can you blame them for finding what comfort they could find among creatures of their kind/ and you are going to tell me that that is any different from what everyone else does/ all of you find yourselves in the arms of people just like you/ beyond what graves they dig for themselves/ i am told by professionals/ people who do not know them but supposedly these are professionals so utterly wise/ that such feral boys are emotionally damaged goods/ you create a theory and then build a rigging all around it/ reflecting back to the culture you are a part of as a temple priest what that culture wants o see and hear/ while at the same time your subtitles look down on them with their legs spread for giving their customers exactly what it is the trick wants/ which is usually to squeeze as much value as he can in bangs for bucks/ his cum into their shit/ i am here to tell you that even the broken ones you fuck in the mouth find their sustenance quite outside the boundaries you create in order to protect your status quos/ for all of you good people are grounded but grounded to what i really, truly, absolutely, do not want to know/ please do not send me your erudite conclusions because you are always wrong/ who the fuck do you think you are/ because i know this: even the ruined ones have studied hard how to beat the headman/ who as guardian appears to be cerberus without so much as the bother of disguise/ so what if i have slept with them in the rooms of charybdis/ so what if i have laughed in amazement at their dangerous assurances that apprehension is the sentry of a million gods/ so what if i have shot up with them an invisibility whose conduit was to the running edge of sleep/ so what of it/ so what can you do about it/ with your stupid morals and your rules/ denounce me hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah/ i am just a wandering vagabond/ another derelict wolf prowling at the gates of beck and call/ taking notes as to how the depth varies/ counting flood marks/
firefuck lake maroon/ the wolves on crystal meth/ you stood there and the iron mold ground burned shit into the air/ redstart rust as cherry as your somber blush/ the fields were burning all the way to key west/ driven snow/ your cum like chinese white/ my mouth in murmuring/ curling tongs/ the bridges to the island were thin veins of nitric acid/ feeding sharks with singe/ dancing on the brink of graves/ margaritas on the rocks/ you were simmering naked/ the astral plane plunged the sun down into the sinister contortion that was the sea/ we fished for sheepheads all night and caught them, too/ spooning meth into the to go coffee cups/ velocity was resistance/ having left lake maroon behind/ us/ we slept on the beach/ i held you hard when the sun came up/ at the mercy of the wolves/
waif you wanted me to tie you up/ the knots became your compass/ demon mutilation scratching at the door/ desire by design/ i was blinded by the walking of the tightrope/ how did you learn all this stuff/ the swarms of you and fingers/ opening me in debt to failure after failure/ the unwritten record of us a rosetta stone/ no one has to know you said/ i laughed and laughed for three straight days/ that and the barbarism of the monks will take care of themselves/
all your embryos our foreign lands were aboriginal conclusions/ a ticket on a flight through wombs of stirring/ having been evicted from a lineage of deeper sleep/ by the interruption of the border guards/ primal pleiades, fluent logistics/ your visa, my reckoning of mongrel lists/ your fucking me by the tomorrow of your millenniums/ doomsday creature of the archaic/ breeding all your lies and licking my hole clean of all your squirming embryos/ paris again when i left you promised not to find me/ liar/ you found me but i was living with a bunch of boys/ that you thought we were all fucking and sucking was not my problem/ i made no move to disabuse you of your fantasies/ like the one i could return/ you were in way too deep/ the boys thought you were my mother/ all you wanted was a hearing but the seaasaw company had fled europe for the summer/ je vous baisée dans le parc à la fin de la rue/ transfixed with versatility/ you rode the painted ponies wet on the carousal/ i drove the big bike and you did hold on/ equilibrium had never been our thing/ your wooden pony and the persians/ the boys, they’re so mutinous, you said/ more mercurial than mutinous, i said/ parisian insurrections in the streets, students, and michel foucault was dead/ to you, he had been a visionary voice in books now as dead as he was/ to me, he had only been a trick who had a thing for whips and ropes/ took it to the elbow/ i never did attend the post-structuralist events/ you wanted me to explain the french/ oh, that/ you to late dinner 15 Place Vendôme/ it was all the explanation i know how to give/ neither one of us was hemingway/ the wind that night, you on the bike, your hair unraveling/ wheels within wheels and the webwork/ cigarettes and the pigalle/ you back to cdg, so methodical and the bags/ the devil and i have always just had one/ we played in sand before he died, we played in the sand upon that windswept north sea beach/ we even took our clothes off and waded into the water — holding hands — just slightly past the level of our balls/ my balls are turning blue, he said/ we were shivering/ shrunk to whispers and corridors of hospitals i made him endure it was torture i was the torturerman with agendas and requirements/ he grit his teeth and made himself live for me/ but he did not want to be here/ i put him in my bed to be warm with us/ I went back to the beach to see if i could find our footprints/ the ones down at the water’s edge had, of course, been washed away, but there were others where we had played like idiots in the sun and sand/ what do we leave behind/ secret things, empty houses, forgiveness, dreams, our rushing and our resignations/ there they were footprints in the sand, a chaos of dogs and serenity/ firmly grounded in farewell/ the fog often made us oblivious out there among the ghosts/ but other days the sun bore down/ and hanging on was a glimmering of absolutes concealing a shattered motherload of burning roots/ i am now a watchdog through the potter’s fields and barns/ i cannot bear to see the sand by standing here in this dark room marveling at how love soars like the waves again and death is just a chariot rasping through the sawgrass on its way to such ruins as he holds tightly to his dead breast and pulled by beasts and tigers pacing in the attic of our winter leaves, where light once fell to give the beach its shape/ i am not one of them/ you/ and your beckoning/ no, i will not wrap my arms around you, no/ no/ no, i refuse to come complacently/ i will not do it/ i will fight you to my last breath/ your authority means nothing to me/ the turbulent snow-bent sky folds itself around your nakedness in someone else’s bed/ mine is about living, and being alive, and fucking, and the gravity of violets/ i recognize your full of witch’s teeth/ i laugh; you cannot compel me to do it/ i push you away/ i resist/ not just yet/ who showed you where i live/ other men find everything waiting there/ but i am not one of them/ o death/ crowned by ancient waves/ love is a lunatic/ its carnivorous tongue down my throat, yes, yes/ you death, do not even know that we exist/ parenthesis parenthesis not unlike a powerline underground, but they go dazzled, and this secret of sitting in the sun with all the various currents no adult can connect to, and this, too, wired, electrical connection resonates in their shattered beds they refuse to die in, who says it calls for blood/ what it calls for from the earth is some solid ground to walk upon/ and to stop obsessing with the falling of our weight into graves of dirt with our mouths of rain leaving our soaked and sodden clothes behind/ we float from jerking off to tinted walls/ lifting like corpses from the weeds/ the dead house in moderation one at a time/ in a perfect world in a perfect world/ safe harbors would be able to withstand slowly rising waves or more o much more is often necessary/ safe from what pounding in what sleep/ stares through us/ our bones bared/ okay i'll just say it/ i am not sure that the idea of the safe harbor can actually exist/ it would like melting coins/ you can make it safer i suppose/ or as safe as the drudgery of a mausoleum/ where what embryos plummet to their dark address/ safe is perhaps the old neighborhood/ harbor is something moving in that light/ solitudes and rift/ no punishment or harangues/ the monster has been pushed aside/ now, year after year you will have to defend it/ or be content to be a passenger/ aboard a ship as brilliant as orion/ floats as languidly as a milkweed upon what winter's freezing cold/ |
Polaroid PoetryWARNING: AN ARTIST'S COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE & EXPLICIT IMAGERY
the boy box People do not get this idea and they never will. Their ideas about what is sex abrogate any changes in the construct. When I use the word boy I am not referring to the box of an age group, but to the far more complex condition of vulnerability. We do not, in fact, desire to see our models in new fashion. We prefer the old fashion of nudity. We strip them even as they walk down the runway with their smiles. We are not, in fact, selling the box of fashion at all. We are selling the box of sex. We only want to see the “boy” naked because we have assigned the role of vulnerability to the box of the younger male.
turning tricks when you have hiv turning tricks when you have hiv is no small accomplishment/ not that anyone in paris cared that year/ at fourteen, he was not grown enough to be the river king/ what can i say other than we needed the money/ all we have to do is jerk off into the river/ the seine was a knot of flames that year/ i am black myself because the light got ragged from fighting with the stars/ they were older men/ older than i was anyway/ who had seen tristan’s videos the way a sorrowful noise flies overhead and beyond my parisian windows/ i was not the one who made the arrangements/ i am innocent of that/ but no, i am the one who that year spent (spends) all the money/ money that we needed/ doing tricks with hiv is not unlike a car crash bursting into blue just as it gets sucked up by the sun/ no one has to touch anyone/ tristan said/ knowing my complete aversion to being touched/ not that i had not done tricks before/ dragging myself into their houses and their lives/ it’s just that, at some moment while you are pushed up as far as it will go into the trick’s ass, time becomes an ancient circle/ but this would not be like that, tristan said/ they just want us to stand at the edge of the bridge and jerk off into the seine/ it would be late at night/ they would be in the shadows which was where they lived/ nothingness in conflict with the dust that year/ i could tell you that fields grow fast, and that i did not want to do this/ but it was a lot of money, and no one had to touch anyone which is the best kind of sex anyone can have/ doing tricks with hiv lives somewhere as an idea (you do not have to act on) between wisdom and oblivion/ why us/ and why us when no one knows anything about us/ because you are a bloodstained stillness, and i am a famous whore, tristan said/ attempting to convince me we should commit this crime (it had to be a crime) as if in sudden fascination/ whose stillness in the pull of gravity would be more lucrative than reading our poetry in bookstores/ hiv is this forever bitter everything is over and is as savage as the taste of slavery that lives between your legs like soap/ i was too old and tristan was too young and the tricks (there was a group of them) were envious of sacrifice and of the dead/ the corpses from the void who would wheel among the lepers, oh, that would be us in our starry nights of mutiny and auction/ we could always fill our pockets with stones and jump into the blackness like the sky had opened up/ it’s true that i had suckled tristan riddled with arrows driven into his dependence on upturned eyes imploring him to stop/ this flowing of the currents that crossed a gunmetal sky sleek with meanness and dark with ink/ there was the blood, the sepulcher, and then there was the money/ an autumn night of cuming on a bridge/ our seed that year into the black flowing bloom below/ i was not the famous one whose stars are always rigid with mirage and tricks upon the travelers/ my stars were molded by the memory of tongues/ i am a shallow man and did not tell tristan i am impotent/ maybe no one would notice/ a void unfastened not in collision but in a burst of tristan’s cum like satan feasts among the maggots long before they sprout their wings/ i never saw the tricks/ i only felt them somewhere out there hiding in a thousand prophecies and wanting to scream but holding it/ we had decided we would wear leather and just take our cocks out (the people on the bridge walked by quietly smiling and pretending not to see) as if the warm weather had arrived (it hadn’t) and all of us were lost/ lost into a yielding and take another pill you eyeless dolls/ the dogs were cold and i was scowling when tristan came — came like — breeding on the ragged edge of metallic bridges paid for by the golden coins he was always biting with his perfect teeth that year/ his cum of fire and virus incriminating reclamation of a sum totaled sterling circumnavigation that had turned not maelstrom black but dispensed into a midnight marketplace of riverwombs gone blue as a dutchman’s eyes swing from side to side like two stones whose fate had always been the bottom of a well/
highwire act/ dark wires untangling you grab on to the high wires of your life to keep from falling/ looking down/ when did it become a crime to not believe in hope/ such a convenient illusion/ there are no archives in a high wire act/ there is only hanging on/ moment to moment/ eyelash to eyelash/ shoe to shoe/ wire to wire/ there is no remembering dark with water/ just don't let go/ no records as to who has fallen to the ground/ there is no way to sleep/ insomnia is a fugitive's final drug/ high wires grotesque with secrets/ dying fingers pluck the bones/ genuflecting hope/ but the suits almost always win/ the powerful are the powers of indifference/ there were holes in my socks today/ and derelict holes in my skull where my eyes should be/ hope is a renaissance of longing for the void/ the black is closing in/ the wires will sing tonight and quickly through the door/ the sky is raining ticking clocks/ hopefulness is as inexcusable as a dead river and your job is to clean the carp out/ and sweeps the day away/ even the clown is connected tight/ dark wires untangling/ a cloak ripped through with holes lollipop, lollipop, o lollilolli pop/ in the old daze/ we called her lollipop/ we still call her lollipop/ as a whore she was a complete failure/ lollipop had a mantra: i've never been fucked, i never will get fucked, and i have no intention of getting fucked right here right now/ she'd blow you though/ hookers live in the world/ lollipop was a lesbian/ most hookers are lesbians they hate men/ i have never known a hooker who was not abused/ not one/ lollipop was the whore the other whores gave their kids to/ there was always a drama in lollipop central/ one day, she picked up her brood and moved the lot of them to the country/ no one knew where she got the money for the land and for the house which was a wreck but it was a house/ i for one do not want to know/ there have always been kids running around that place/ big ones, little ones/ most hookers show up (eventually) to get the kid back (if the kid wants to go back)/ but some do not/ lollipop has dogs, too/ whole place is a kennel/ the moth was going to lollipop's/ i drove a bike/ do not ask me about the bike/ i will not explain/ i have no business being on a bike/ but there it is/ in fact, the only time i ever feel alive, is on a motorcycle/ I used to ride lollipop around the neighborhood in the old daze/ her hands would play with my nipples/ i told you, she's a lesbian/ i do not know how lollipop does it/ i do not want to know how lollipop does it/ some things are dangerous to know/ i do not know what anyone grows up there or where they grow it/ the moth just resigned himself to the idea that superman really was a suicide after all/ no mom, no nothing/ i gave him a ride around the motel parking lot on the bike/ he tried to smile/ but as a smile goes, this one failed the smile test/ i let him wear my helmet for a while/ i like the helmet, he said/ he might have loved and lived among the monkeys in the trees/ all his victories had been from town to town/ his appearance was handsome enough but his story was a lip bit-through a blowtorch/ but you could take me, the moth claimed/ reread the instructions on the cereal box, kid/ an old guy and a young both with aids take on a kid the size of a kindergarten rug rat/ i'm mad but i'm not that mad/ the world hates my guts as it is/ the world had not shrunk to fit this kid/ this kid's whole universe leaked blood everywhere/ my mother, my whore (now, there's a book title) had left him hanging/ worn out by whores into the threadbare child he had become/ the dividing line between lucidity and darkness IS suicide/ superman's death had diminished us all for as long as we would live/ i live in too many different worlds/ the truth is that all our lives and the guts that come with those lives are split wide open at any given time/ the truth is that we are all salvaging survival from the loud pitch of loneliness and one very crowded wire we line up on/ one crow at a time/ when it came time to go, the moth just clung to my leg/ but you're not coming back, he said/ it was an accusation/ i have been licked clean of pain behind the shoulder-blades/ your mom could turn up, you know/ you doubt it, the moth said/ i did, too/ we stand naked in the landscapes of pure necessity/ i stood transparent in front of this boy/ he drew his small body up and sobbed/ the bridges are not non-partisan/ the thorns i cannot absorb into my flesh, i try to keep at a safe distance/ he will become dangerous whirling down other streets/ i had this one friend, a chick who otherwise i kinda thought of as hip enough, who said i should go to the cops to find the moth's mom/ just go to the cops/ whores do not just go to the cops/ everything i write is a detachment/ just go, lollipop said/ i was set to/ i even made it to the door/ i turned around/ i told the moth that if he would promise to remember me, he could have the helmet/ he crossed his heart and hoped to die/ it looks ridiculous on him/ but with that helmet he is a hit with all the other kids/ we are all selves withheld/ i got back on the bike and met up with the younger of us at the next motel/ we went out to a stupid bar called timber cove/ there was no timber and there is no cove/ there are only tequila shots and limes/ superman killed himself/ he was a fuck and a disappointment to many and his mother was a hooker from chicago/ life is an accident and a cloak ripped through with holes/ there but for the grace of god/ hiv among the homeless voices/ who do not necessarily remember to take their pills/ pills, pills, and more pills/ take a pill, baby, and the house of rant will suddenly appear/ the moving company will move your stuff in on friday/ please keep the lawn mowed/ pacing back and forth, back and forth/ this animal throwing himself off any number of cliffs/ there are some bushes at the back of the playground where the junkies shoot up junk/ bleach, bleach who brought the bleach: o, no one/ wtf/ we all die anyway/ also by word of mouth needle exchange 6th and market/ it knows in the rant if a lunatic has dignity/ but no/ they're not working hard enough (they lack social skills) so let us punish them/ there's a word for clinical therapy: jail/ the line around the block for a bed in the shelter smells of old men and shoes/ kaposi's sarcoma splotches climbing from the neck into the eyes/ like a roadmap to a purple destination/ community mental health does not treat hiv/ did you bring your medication list/ gotta cigarette/ curio-collecting so morose/ hiv among the homeless/ the blood on the floor of the showers at the shelter and by hope in deadly combat has become a set of wings/ down the drain of which by razor blades/ and suicides/ we have pills for those rants, too/ we all die at county general on the aids ward where the wheelchairs in the hallway are for patients only/ the john doe anonymous (for those who cannot or do not choose to remember their names or their failures) corpse gets a toe tag tied around the big toe with wire when john doe dies thin as gin and there but for the grace of fucking god go the rest of us whose thorazine cages endeavoring to pass as respectable fervently deny such cages hear/ inside the gliding skull at the core of the thing we have the individual/ you; solo, the secret in the knots of blood/ small wonder, eyes with hallows where the wars go in/ culture wars to dress the dead, the body is a wretch/ it covers grief and sin/ only in an instant, one shadow that flows to the rhythm and servitude of the species/ a rootless dream, you, throbbing like the night around me/ gnashes its teeth/ you/ boy/ scarecrow/ with a bloody grin/ there are those who say the past of old men hacks and cuts away at time/ you/ old man/ your sunless bones risen from the earth in secret, the ripening of rivers listening and remembering the pain like dust upon our faces/ you/ touching toward the dark emptiness of self/ your ominous wings and fatal weeping i have your answer/ existence burning away your impotence/ body counts/ building tombs of avid pour/ those long nights of swimming through regret slash/ we lived them and the stake; drifting back, the wind died down/ as all our old lovers have/ you pull/ on/ into my rippled youth/ you boy/ pushing through an eternity of release and mutilation/ lonewolf solitarypoet lonewolf solitarypoet/ who speaks of rooms and the solitary souls on the darker nights from hell/ and slept in the voices of undeceptive light/ walls that never crumble into grief between the ribs/ the dogstars who are abandoned to a wasteland of the secrets where blood runs like the wind is whipped; the way poetry tumbles into time/ the end of skulls forgotten in the sand/ i have placed my stones in clusters of equations in the sky/ yet clean again, my firm legs will rock you swollen with the day’s endurance/ you, howling lays them bare/ fatigue and sleep are silent witness empty in our ancient bed of sheets gone bitter with such flowing dreams that jump into the fragile chaos of delirium/
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Timothée Bârrus
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| (William Cleveland, Founder & Director, Center for the Study of Art and Community) | ||