Poetry
Crossing Over
The prefix trans signifies a crossing over
Transform, transport, transgender,
Transpire, translate, transcend
I belong to a people who cross over
The first time I was in a gay bar
I met a married lawyer named David
And we played
In the garage of the Holiday Inn
This was a transforming experience
In June of '69 Judy Garland died
And I knew that something had dramatically transpired
Like James Barrie transformed imaginations
With Peter Pan and
Michael Bennett reconfigured movement
With a chorus line and
James Baldwin translated race-
Ism and Whitman discombobulated
Verse while Proust sodomized prose and
Verlaine trans-sexted his youth and
A virus called HIV was transferred and
Caused many to cross over
This is what my people do
We go to the edge and
We dive off
We translate mundane into beauty and
We take sadness and pain and create an inverse
This is what we do.
The Thinker
Many years ago
Rene Descartes earned his keep
While deep in thought
And in a lucid moment, he declared
I think, therefore
I am
Now, I think
You think
They think
Therefore, we all are
When Descartes wrote these words
Few people could read
Or study philosophy
Hence, they wouldn't know if they were!
Were they no more?
What of those who
Rarely think
Are they rarely here?
Theists don't think
But they don't disappear
Politicians don't think
And they're everywhere
Economists
Spend little time in thought
But they still lurk here
Descartes was wrong!
He should have said
I am because I am
Much easier for the unwashed masses
And less to think about
Can I get paid for that thought?
Ode to Paris
Paris, the essence of France
The city of love
Or, maybe, the life of love
Is there a difference between the two?
I don't know
I see only romance
Between Parisians
Man and woman
Man and man
Woman and woman
It's very beautiful, very French
However, walking along the street, no one moves until that last moment before bumping into each other
It's a little strange!
And people in the metro are always rushing as if there were a fire
Could it be that it is also love to gently touch each person?
I'm not sure
When I walk around the city, all I see is beauty
Monmartre, Montparnasse, Montgallet and all the monts
Place Des Vosges, Place d'Italie, Place des Fetes, and all the places
St. Michel, St. Sulpice, St. Germain and all the saints
Magnificent art, majestic and gilded buildings, grand and wide boulevards
It's the love of artists, of architects, and of lovers
Hold it! Now I understand!
When one doesn't move in the street, he wants to gently touch me, to love me
And people aren't really hurried in the metro, they just want to gently touch everyone, to love everyone
It's incredible! This love of the people!
Paris, you are the city and the life of love and one can do nothing but love you!
Of this, I am sure.
La Rime
Parfois, je crois, c'est difficile ici
En vivant dans la ville de Paris
Quand on me demande si
Je parle français, je dis oui
Alors, on me parle en Anglais, ainsi
Et on me dit que je dois dire merci
Mais oui, je dirais merci
Si on me parle en français aussi
Parce que je suis un homme qui
Peut parler la langue pour dire que je suis
Ici à Paris pour être parmi
Les hommes qui veulent être maris!
Aussi, j’ai besoin d’un ami avec qui
Il faut parler français à lui
Ou je dis les phrases: mais oui, tant pis, c’est la vie!
Ou si j’ai de la chance: viens maintenant au lit!
Et peut-être, je peut dire tous les mots que je lit
Qui sont plus précis pour être compris
Par les gens avec qui je parle, ici, a Paris
Néanmoins, je prie de parler français assez vi-te
Comme les parisiens pour qui
Il faut que je sois très bien compris
Et aussi, quelque jour, il faut que j’écri-ve
Une histoire de ma vie, ici, a Paris
Pour vendre, j’espère, dans une librairie
SI- bien que tout le monde lit
De la gloire et la joie de Paris, ici
Et ainsi, je peux dire, me voici!
Une autre personne qui vit ici, a Paris
Avec mes amis et mes maris
Pendant, peut-être, le reste de ma vie
Et ensuite, presque français, I will be!
A Vulnerable Age
Do you ever wonder if there is an age
When you stop believing that you'll fall in love?
Forty, Fifty, Sixty
And be alone, all alone until the end
Does a tear form when you hear the words
If it hasn't happened yet...
Or are you strong while crying inside
From forbidden emotions and unseen wounds
All the while, dismissing the hurt
That takes a toll on those of us
Who fear the solitude of the unloved
Or perhaps, the unlovable
But then I see so many twosomes
Miserable and yet resigned
I could not have failed anymore than they
Who teach me what not to do
While sensitivity and fear may increase with time
May I still believe in love at first sight?
Some have claimed such simultaneous magic
And a fear of alone-ness can cause action
Maybe I'll win or maybe not
Is it a prize or a burden?
That need to connect
That need to share
I only know that I'm at a vulnerable age.
Transitory Essentials
There is a futile emotion that causes one's essence to decompose
And deteriorate, depriving it of energy and will and purpose
And the anguish, the decay, the despair, the sorrow
And the surrender are not curtailed by pharmaceuticals or psychology
And the intensity begins to erode the psyche
And the part that encompasses joy is disabled
And the part that maintains sanity fritters
And the part that sustains existence dissociates from consciousness
And contemplation diminishes to nonsensical imaginings
And social interaction becomes intolerable
And conversation is displaced by a disquieting silence
And inauthentic tears seem affected and irrelevant
And the heart aches from a forging of alienation and inconsequence
And the body is weighed down from the clash of inertia and angst
And sustenance provides neither pleasure nor vitality
And a vacant detachment eludes the burden of survival
And fragmentary sleep seems to soothe the delirium
And no one discerns or perceives the inauspicious confinement
And no one has the capability to circumvent unsettling apprehension
And no one can resuscitate the vanished radiance of this interior life
And the seconds trickle into minutes which degenerate into hours
And the hours ooze from a porous sheath of ambivalence to form days
And the days morph from inexorable agony into weeks
And the weeks creep into months of disordered distress
And unexpectedly the inner conflicts dissipate into a seeming truce
And the intimate maelstrom momentarily ceases
And then, so do you.
Death in February (Part 1)
Frantic with intolerable sorrow
Outbursts of excruciating pain
Relentless anguish overwhelms the body, the mind
Memory is tortured with final scenes
Of loss and abandonment
Maker of my very being
Why did you depart so soon
In sickness you never left my side
This day is inconsolable
Helen Therese Delahanty Davis
Loving mother of, adored wife of
Only the conviction that you peacefully evaded suffering
Vehemently impedes a mental disintegration
Eliciting the wherewithal to maintain
A semblance of composure
Notwithstanding bouts of weeping
Damn the Fates and Fausts and Frauds
Abetting the reaper in his crime
Nurturing the malevolence of sadists
Guised as aged disease
Unleash a thread of solace
Into this shroud of hopelessness
Staving off a paralyzing grief
Hacking in my lacerated heart
February twenty-six nineteen ninety-two
Ripping my inner being from its core
Obscuring my impaled essence
Mother, why have you forsaken me?
Be warned, time may never heal this raw, gaping wound
Over days and weeks and months and years
Begetting an angry void covered by a grotesque cicatrix
Blending together with all the life-marks to
Yield a crude, unrefined work-in-despair
Death in February (Part 2)
Forever is such a long time to yearn
Our interlude was but three brisk years
Racked with questions of time and manner
Doom provokes such volatility
As it wrests control and obscures purpose
Never prefaced our respite
I see those dazzling blue eyes
Every time I hear your name in song or prose
Love is so queer
Stupidity even more so
Or was it just unmitigated fear
That silenced my love for you
On that January day in ‘89
Magic happened in an instant
At first sight, desire
You bewitched the room
Or maybe it was just I
Reeling from charisma
While coveting such intimacy.
Inaugural day and we taunted George as we
Twinkled through a chilly morning
How joyful it was to cavort, conspire in unison
Gamboling like midsummer sprites
Relishing the unfamiliar
Ever and ever flowed seamlessly.
Artist, prophet, rebel, wit
Transforming the windy city
Linchpin of acting up
Of inciting the corrupt to profess wrongdoing
Vexing the pols, the docs, the pros
Even the daily mayor himself
Anno Domini
Nineteen-ninety-two
Death won after a valiant standoff
Immunologically deficient
Mighty as you fought
Majestic in your victories
Ecstatic from each breakthrough
Notorious for your resolve
Subsiding only from diminished potency and the
Exhaustion of terminal farewells
Sincerity and compassion commingling with
Acquired syndromes of consumption
Danny, the grief is permanent
Nothing alleviates the emptiness or
Evinces repair of a gouging isolation
Sadness does not dissipate
So much as enhance memories in its wake.
Gertrude's Stepson
At last I see Paris
Not the one of Stein and Hemingway
Or Beckett and Baldwin
The Paris I see is all mine
Harking to me like nimble sirens of old
Eerily seducing me with that transcendent charm
Rendering me flaccid in her presence
And yet, I grow stronger
Mesmerized by beauty, elegance, joie de vivre
Enmeshed in an unabashed world of aesthetic eruptions
Reinvented and reformulated with each passing decade
Into that juxtaposition of antiquity and modernity
Creativity exudes from her pores like No. 5 on a little black dress
And so too must I ooze such a fragrant nouveaute'
No more desperate paperwork in a cubicle of despair
I can't kill what tiny shards of soul I may have left
Nor forsake a latent career as I have yet to have one
Perhaps my time is now — before I lose my looks!
And what better place than the heart of Europe
Rimbaud, Cocteau, Sartre, Saint-Exupery
I descend into enchantment like a pres-ti-di-gi-ta-teur
Savoring it like a French pastry