The first book I ever had published -- if you consider a chapbook a book and self-published as published -- was Untitled and other poems. This debut collection of 20 pieces featured four sonnets, a villanelle, a rondeau, a sestina, and a rispetto. So clearly form's been a literary preoccupation of mine for over 30 years. Do the poems hold up? I'd like to think so. Four of them recently got republished on the website Northwest Indiana Literary Journal: "Hard Knocks After Midnight," "Austin," "Hands off and on," and "Park." All of them are more or less love poems to men I knew at the time. You can read them now exclusively at NIJL since I think your chances of tracking down the original pamphlet are slim to none. Here's the first one as enticement.
Hard knocks after midnight
You wake me up to tell me that you’re drunk again
then talk of death. You talk as if we’re peers from some
same place yet I have never seen Fort Worth. You’ve
lost friends, lovers, and your dad. I’ve lost no
one really not for years. The aches we share have more
to do with what we want than what we have or had.
You understand the humps I don’t. I wonder do
you crave a bra of roughened hands like I do. Do
you feel the rend, the split of seams, the fray and tear
of loss not only as what has been but as what
might be. I’ve yet to lose a friend; I’ve not had
a lover; my dad isn’t dead. Instead, I talk
to you of touching objects, tell you sometimes clothes
contain a person’s past. The wardrobe’s full of ghosts.
You want none of it. You pound murmur down. You punch
holes in solace; searching for that shared grief; knowing
that if not death, sickness I have seen, have witnessed:
sore and lesions, sweats, that horrid, harping cough.
Liquor’s left this gentle lilt upon your tongue
that fails to soften words whose solid centers hit
like rocks until I want to pull you from my ear
and slip you down against me, feel a heat, that warmth
of contact, exploit comfort, fool myself to thinking
that by slipping each inside the other we could
black out—then flash! inside my brain, I realize
I’ve used sex in every way but how I want,
in every way but how I wait…for what.
What is desire. What is hunger. Who’s revolting,
you or me, and in which way. Quiet is my cheap trick.
It fools everyone. You’re thinking when I’m not.
Silence is the hammer. Watch. I hit myself.
I will not get involved. I will not get involved.
This curative, this necessary therapy,
survival tool, I badly need but do not do.
Hereby, the wire hanger slays another bitch.
The needle punctures yet another life and lung.
Let’s sit down on the sidewalk, put our cupped hand out
like beggars and hope one of the passing boys may grace
us with a kiss instead of coins. Friendship has little
to do with this. Get up. Wake up. Blood brothers let us
strive to be despite our never having made that final cut.
The cover photo (above) for Untitled and other poems is a color negative taken by my poet pal Mare Davis at a Queer Pride event in Portland, Oregon in 1994.
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