During fifth grade, I was called
closeted queer and tall faggot.
I still live at home
but I've paid for many apartments
so homeless boys would bend me over,
call me “Lover” or “Handsome.”
With all that rent, I could move out,
but without them I'd rather die in the street.
People laugh at me during parties,
ask to touch my beard. Make it a game.
I ask men to spit on me.
Hegel said: The subject must realize itself.
The Bible tells me I was made from dust.
I am who I am when I am filth.
This is very, very well realized.
Just don't know the market for it.
Perhaps if it were underground Paris, 1923...
I think it's your essential piece.
I don't even know what to say beyond this is great work.
*
It really is.
I think it's his 187th alchemic distillation/diluting, cooling/melting, breaking/gathering, freezing/boiling of the same compounds
and it's finally produced gold.
which also produces the question:
What now?
Continue to go over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over the same material ad naseum?
Or be freed to look around at Otherness?
Such a devastating closing line.
*
The last stanza slays. Peace *
*
Goodness. This is amazing. How come more people have not discovered this piece? The relationship between the specific details and the big ideas is quite something. To include Hegel and the Bible and really get at what you mean in such a short space -- well, that's genius. The last two stanzas are killer.
Big *