Thoroughly Examined Life

Fears

2009-05-15T18:50:00.003-05:00

If we were made of stone we would
walk this Earth unconcerned
of anything, for anybody.

We'd trudge slowly forward
toward achieving our goals
without the slightest bit of
hesitation.

But we're not stone:

we fall while rollerblading and
skin our knees, yelping
for the part of us lost;

we scale a tree, higher and
higher, branch after branch,
ultimately losing our
footing in arrogance, in agony
on the ground, part of us broken;

we lie awake at night,
crying to ourselves (or God,
if we believe) at the uncertainty
of the ground beneath our feet,
our failures.

We have our fears,
of riding bikes,
driving cars,
heights,
spiders, or
the very thing we want
to be part of and cannot--
humanity.

These fears creep up,
unsuspecting, nurse with
a 3-inch needle and syringe,
pulling all the confidence
out of our veins.

No, we are not always
so fragile, rag dolls in the
hand of an overeager child.

(We cut through mountains
with dynamite-- BAM!)

(We stand in front of trucks,
statuesque in solidarity)

(We let freedom ring, from
North to South we let our
words echo, even if our
death is a consequence)

(We dream, and dream,
and dream, scaling mountains
with a flurry of imagination)

And...yet...we...falter,

masking true emotions
in violence, spending days
teary-eyed in bed, struggling
to even let a single word
escape our open mouths.

We are not made of stone
and thus our path undulates
erratically on the most
universal of human emotions:
fear.

In the worst of the times we
are even afraid of our self,
looking in the mirror naked
and exposed, wondering why
a monster is reflected back.

Yet we can overcome these fears.

Unlike stone, our form and ideas
are elastic--

with a little tug, pulling the
courage we suddenly see lit up
in a firefly dance,
we can transcend
these limitations.

We can go anywhere.

Obscurities

2009-05-13T17:46:00.005-05:00

You look down at the sidewalk,
perceptive eyes picking minute
details out of an otherwise
indiscriminate haze:

fissures in the smooth surface,
dates inscribed with jagged edges,
little critters crawling on
what must be a vast plane for them.

You look at the sidewalk
and see something more complex.

You bend the rigid metal of the
analytic with what you
envision in a simple glance.

You are not afraid to embrace obscurity.
.
.
.
.
.
I read a book by an author
nobody seems to have heard,
dust(y) jacket in mint condition
though it's been a quarter century.

Only two others have checked it
out, the last a decade ago,
and I can't figure out why:

Yes, the prose is intricate,
even overwrought in spots--
an effect of trying too hard--

but whole passages are somehow
etched into my flesh, consequence
of undaunted beauty and
boundless creativity.

I wonder, as I set the book
down and break to decompress,
if it because the words are
bricks through windows of
complacency that people
turn away, afraid.
.
.
.
.
.
I am sitting in a nursing home
room, staring a woman I've
known my entire life who
now, somehow, seems alien.

She calls me John in a frail
voice, though that's not my name,
and I begin believing this
lack of recognition to be mutual.

Her body is even different:
waif-like, with a gaunt face
overwhelmed by cerulean saucers
that gaze absently in every
direction.

I wonder when she is going to die,
even as we gaze at each other
for a second of
bittersweet understanding.

I want her to live;
of course I want her to live!
Yet I don't want this disease
to push her further into this
grotesque obscurity.
.
.
.
.
.
We look at the little flower,
blooming, as rays of sun
peak through clouds, and
wonder:

why are we destroying life,
so beautiful?

why are we fixated on destruction?

It's seems we don't care about
this blooming anymore, tired
of sitting at canvas and putting
little brushstrokes down to
finish our masterpiece.

We've accomplished so much,
gone so far.

Buildings stretch toward
the heavens in metallic glory.

And yet, we watch this
blooming and it has no
affect on us, same droll look
as we worry about our
dispossession.

The very planet that
cradled our civilizations,
Nature, is slowly falling
out of consciousness, falling,
fast.

Can we survive if we lose it all?

5/15

2009-05-11T23:34:00.007-05:00

My bones are
somehow soft.

Formless spectre drifting,
languidly over the Earth.

It all seems so vast and
unmentionable.

My fear, precipitous
and consuming.

I look in the mirror
and see my innards:

large intestine, pancreas,
brain, bowel,

quivering, wondering
what the hell the future holds,

in my arms I imagine
a baby,

(no, not a baby, not right)

in my arms I imagine
a black widow,

I am alone, in a dark
room, but not

dark enough to miss
the red hourglass,

I will die, in this dream
I will die.

And the moments
leading up to it flashback

as the venom, so potent,
floods every inch my body.

Abjection in tattered
clothes as I sip soup,

out of cheap carafe
under the oaks in the park;

still further back as he
leaves me,

sludge spewing from his
mouth as he slams the door;

the death of dear friends,
cloaked in black as I weep,

stream running down
my cheeks;

to what seems a pitiful
moment of exaltation:

a slim volume of poems
published,

"Birth/Death," fragments
of loss and life, a mosaic,

all shattered now, all gone
in this spiral downward,

to the dungeon, hammer
against the birth,

leaving only empty space
and cessation.

All because of 5/15,
5/15, day of reckoning

when I get that letter
in the mail,

postman indifferent to
the fear I feel,

strong emotions of
stagnancy, suspension,

stepping out in summer
sun and body melting

molasses on pavement
as the ants devour you.

5/15
I cannot help but repeat,

I'm a broken record,
walking cliche,

thinking the end of my
life is suddenly upon

me if I do not get a yes.

Reality settles in,
bones hardening

as my form materializes
once again:

5/15 is not an end,
but a beginning,

I want to publish
those poems,

birth and death
of ideas, things, people

alive and well in my
mind,

(I've got a story to tell)

compassion in my
heart as I settle my hands

soft, gentle, against
the tree branch,

this world has not seen
enough of me,

it must quake and falter
and be remade,

in a new image,
without the smoke,

tear down the facades
and expose the harsh

lines of the face, attitudes,
and bend them to your will.

5/15
5/15

It is you who should
be fearful.

Beauty (Through a Lens)

2009-05-08T18:40:00.000-05:00

Negation and Queer History

2009-05-08T18:15:00.003-05:00

I am posting these comments that I included in my poem "Negation" because I feel they are important in terms of who I am intellectually and may serve to explain not only that poem but many of the other poems I have done previously. I really do want to start a dialogue on this and always welcome comments:

I think that loss and forgetting history figures prominently into queer culture. Older queer men who have lived through AIDS seem to be forgetting major events that have occurred in "queer history." This is nothing involuntary; rather, these men have ignored history because it is painful, because it disrupts any notions of comfort, exposing the full face of the monster lurking in humanity.

These assimilationist politics reflect the larger problem that is occurring among queer youth today. Far from the so-called increasing acceptance of queers based in marriage "equality", I think that the unapologetic gay bashing and bullying demonstrates the ill-effects of this denial of history (which is inspired, in part, by "Feeling Backward" and partly by the piece @harveymilk wrote entitled "Levity and Gravity.")

To deny history only creates psychical uncertainty and distress; history never goes away. The feelings of loss, shame and guilt are not gone in this denial. History is not some dead Truth of past events, but informs the present in so many respects. It's literally alive with each breath we take.

And so I wonder what the full consequences of this denial by an older generation are. Who teaches the kids history? Who mentors them? Is the idea that is pushed "that we are like everyone else" and that our "love is equal" problematic? On a basic level, yes, we do want to be loved and love, but how is that love defined and constrained through a heteronormative matrix? What about those who want to be fluid in who they love? Can anybody love multiple people at the same time? Are you viewed like some zoo animal when you walk down the street holding your lover's hand or when you go in for a kiss?

And so on and so forth. The intersectionality of queer history, loss and erasure; the psyche (and deconstructing theories of psychology which have victimized and dehumanized queer people); LGBT politics nationally and locally; youth; personal experiences as queer man; and academic meditations on gender, class, race, etc. really have informed what appears to be a rather simple piece on the surface.

Negation

2009-05-08T00:56:00.004-05:00

He got that flag
many years ago
in the woods of
Bard,

displaying the
rainbow prominently
in his dorm,
self-expression
blossoming.

He has displayed
it since,
through moves,
through tragedy,
when fear and
uncertainty settled
in his body.

But he's taken it
down, just over a
week now,

when I came home
one night it was
gone, replaced by
some minimalist
piece of "art,"

(in quotes because
it lacked soul).

And when I asked
him about this
switch, he replied,
with a disconcerting
smugness,

"I have grown up
now. I have settled
down. That flag is
just a relic."

I looked at him
but said nothing,
in that moment
the connection
we created years
earlier disconnected,
suddenly.

I have grown up now,
I repeated to myself,

I have settled down,
I couldn't let the words
leave me,

the flag is just relic,
I couldn't hold back
the tears.

He's abandoned it all:
uneven fireworks
display of self-discovery,

struggle as his occasional
lisp or soft handshake cost
him a job,

the faces,
voices,
minds
that ceased
to laugh, growl in anger,
or create wonders
because of the monster
lurking in civilization,

and the kids like
him, wiping cum off
hands at this hour,
who deal with that
monster daily.

(I weep harder
as I think about it.)

All lost,
history vanquished
in three short
sentences and
a simple action.

I can't believe he
doesn't realize what
he's done.

I found out he's
not the man I thought
he was, the man
I came to love in
my awkward days.

I am not sure if I
I will leave him,

(I still love him)

but I cannot live
with someone who
has forgotten,
someone who is,
even without knowing,
feeding the monster
that haunts and chases
a people.

I am not asking
him for a parade,
but to remember
we are not the same
and never will be.

As we age, history
doesn't die.

It only grows with
us, breathing and
shifting in our
own experiences and
collectively.

I am asking him
to remember and
put up that flag again.

As I Lay (Dying) In a Holy City of the Imagination

2009-05-02T20:35:00.005-05:00

I've made up
my mind already,

morbid thoughts
somehow managing
to escape the grasp
of happiness,

I know where
I want to die.

Only nineteen
and already
imagining the
penultimate breath,

so curious,
with so much life to
live, imagining it
cessation.

Why?

I am not afraid...
or at least I do
not want to be,
to die.

And already I
feel a weight,
an unencumbered darkness,
clawing, chameleon body:

Mother Earth struggling,
to shade herself, yet
melting,
losing form as exhaust
fumes dance sluggishly
around her,

genetic material coded
for disease--
failing hearts, kidneys,
livers, eyes,

and natural decomposition
of mind,
body,
soul,
torn and frayed
by the winds
of the Time.

And yet,

this
declaration is not
dark,

is not mysterious,

does not wear a
grotesque mask,

(I've never felt lighter.)

Perhaps it is because
I lack the eyes of a seer,
composition of a
misanthrope, am no
wraith

that I imagine my
death to be wondrous,

not in design, but
in the moments leading
up.

I want to die
in New Orleans,

a favourite poet
remarked it was
one of the holy cities
of the imagination.

Walking along
uneven sidewalks,
disfigured by the
roots of mighty oaks,
as the sun sets,
illuminating the sky
in royal purples

I cannot miss the
truth in this statement,
and this only a
fragment of a larger
whole

to the grandeur
and horrors,
superimposed
in vast mansions
with shutters you
want to peak in
to houses, in ruins,
you could see from
miles.

I want to die in
the place that has
inspired Capote,
Faulkner, Williams
and the like,

a place where my
own passing disappears

into the mystery
of Vieux Carre in
winter fog,

into the anger
and sadness of
the huddled masses,
hungry outside of
a shelter in Mid-City,

into the imagination
of the past,

into the imagination
of where the world
will go,

and into the imagination,
so holy and profound,
that lets me float freely
above all ills which
plague my body and mind.

I cannot imagine it any
other way.

At the Edge

2009-05-01T19:02:00.003-05:00

I sit, at the edge
of civilization, I
gather myself,
taking time to
collect and sort
wild thoughts,

like pieces of paper
into a filing cabinet:
emotions,
artistic imaginings,
sociological theories,
and an ominous
category,
the uncertain.

As I stare in
all directions,
the landscape emerges
in a way it hadn't before,

ground so flat you'd
set a giant marble down
and it wouldn't move
a centimeter,

vast expanses of
water glistening in
sunshine, the Gulf
illuminated in all its
mystery,

and houses, newly built,
teetering over wild
grasses on wooden stilts,
prepared this time for
the perfect storm.

All these images
resonate so profoundly,
any order I had created
evaporated for this blend,
of emotions, academics,
artistry.

I feel it in my body,
my bones, my brain,
my toes--
these reverberations
resonating in an
indescribable way.

All I can say is
that I have been changed,
in a few quick glances
I don't want to leave
this place, even though it
seems so foreign to me.

I close my eyes,
trying to see if I can
untangle this mess
of thoughts and return
to where I was before,
collected, in a comfortable
equilibrium, but
I do not think I can:

though I never expected
it, this place has changed
me forever, made me
anew,

in glancing at this
stark civilization on
the edges of these states,
houses perched high
over ground to avoid
the fury of Mother Nature,

and the vast expanses
of water, reedy grasses,
and it all, this untamed
life,

I've seen how resilient
humanity is, I've seen
how boundaries are
pushed, how people
live a life so unlike my
own,

and the thirst for
exploration, reawakened,
has left me hungry:

for more of a challenge,
for sights and sounds
that I feel are beautiful,

and to write,
like I have no tomorrow.

This place,
as I drive by
in the passenger seat
of the car,
how buildings have been
left in ruins
and how I wish
to piece these fragments
back together,

flood of emotions,
of academics, artistry,

I know there are no
easy answers.

My Voice

2009-04-30T18:25:00.001-05:00

I barely have words
anymore, mostly
just sounds, fragments,
of sentences but
never complete--
verb or noun somehow
absent.

What's happened?

This is the most I've
been able to say in
days and already I
feel freer:

language has liberated
me, from when I was
a kindergarten kid
creating simple stories
to college life, when
theorists, facing Darkness,
told me to sling a new
future at the Rooted
even when slinging mud
was easier,

language has consoled me,
taught me not to hate myself
when society uttered
its damnation onto me,
providing an outlet for
all my fears in this dangerous
world.

Yet I have come to
a precipice of despair--
linguistic failure,
intellectual upheaval,
blocked and
stuck writing
gobbledygook.

I desire to see
what I have written
smolder.

Again.
What has happened?
I cannot escape
this question.
I must know
why I can only
seem to write
about my failures.

Sudden onset dumbness?
No.
I write now, I still have
it in me.

Fear? But of what?
I used to cower in corners,
but I've long since
between in all
weather conditions.

Or maybe it just
the uncertainty,
of not knowing my trajectory,
of not knowing what afflicts me
and this maddened
sense builds from it,
frenzy blocking anything
worthwhile, clouding
my vision.

Whatever the case,
let me be clear:

I
want
my
voice
back.

I want it back,
boisterous,
booming,
bending
flexibly to
my environment.

I must be free.
Need to be free.
I want...want to...
live.

The Secret, Told (Part 3)

2009-04-27T23:08:00.005-05:00

Just having
woken from my slumber,
the air is already
heavy on my
unequivocal assertion:

I must tell
my secret today,
I must.

Whom will I tell?
How will I say it?
Is it even worth
predicting or
should I just live
And let it happen?

Maybe my biggest
roadblock has been
overthinking,
the situation, the
aftermath, my
future.

Maybe nothing will
change whatsoever
when I utter it?

I'd like to think that
in my heart
nothing will change
when I unchain
this burden, but
what a burden it
has been for all
these years.

How it has made
me see the world
differently, as if
I am staring directly
into a fisheye lens,
margins bending
outward

and the
center being pushed
back, coloured further
by a filter, objects'
essence in
different hues.

I am preparing
myself:

dressing up
in finery not
too fine,

rubbing the mousse
through my
hair for perfect
effect—
but not too perfect,

repeating it
over, and over,
and over, until
I get it just right,
what it I want
to say in that
moment of Truth.

And in this
process I have decided
the who,
the person I will
utter my secret to is
my best friend of
a decade I've
traveled across
continents with
and who I know
will never abandon
me, regardless of
what I have to say.

I step out the house,
styled and over-prepared,
all of this attention to
detail lost, as nervous
anticipation lights neural
pathways in my body,
sending jitters, clammy
skin, unease,

you'd think I'm giving the
most important speech
of my life.

In a way I am.
Not in front of
energized masses
as a dream was
uttered for all to hear
or a graduation speech
cherished forever,

but this is the most
important moment of
my life,

years of struggle
overcome, but not
forgotten, in uttering
a single phrase.

I am almost there,
almost to his house,
modern ecological design
and soft curves,
the little flower
garden
out back with blooming
orchids,
the wall of books
and wooden step stool
I am afraid to stand on—

comfort in the
moments leading
up to the uncomfortable.

I try to prevent my
face from going contorted
and I am winning!
I am getting farther
than I have ever gotten
before on the power
of my will:

I cannot live a lie.
I cannot live in shadow.
I must be free.

An invigorating feeling
and then I see him
sitting outside in
sunshine by the garden,
smiling face, and
I shatter the soft
scene like a brick through
glass,

I must tell you something,
I say in a voice meek and
serious, knowing I need to
save all my strength for
the moment of utterance.

He seems concerned as
I tell him this, the smile
dissolving to a concerned
look as he offers me a sip
of water,
which I take without
hesitation as I feel
cool liquid slide, slowly,
down my throat,
that peculiar "glug" noise
making my lose
nervousness, if for a
second.

I look at him, with
a ferocity that must
be difficult to focus on,
and breathe—
slowly, laboured,
running my hand
through my hair,
careful style
lost to untamed
territory.
Thick silence
Clouds the
Warmth of spring renewal,
as he remains
unwavering in
his gaze.

In this moment,
I know he is a true friend,
dealing with my
insoluble behaviour.

That thought
alone liberates me,
to merely
open my mouth
And let harsh whispers
escape my body:

Listen, I have
something to tell
you that I never
told anybody else.

Almost there,
Almost there,
I tell myself.

It is a secret
which I have
held on to
for so long
because I
have been afraid
to say it.
I have been
ashamed,
worried
it would
forever ruin
whatever
image you
might have
had of me.

(Not so hard,
it's started and
will just flow...)

But I cannot
be silent any
longer. I'm tired
of letting
this boa
constrictor
run wild with
my body.

When I was
a little boy...

You know
how I never
really talk about
my mother or
father…well,
when I was
little, my father
used to molest
me, at night,
I was five or six,
like a young tree
enduring a
thunderstorm,
he would put his
hand in places
that he shouldn't
and my mother knew!
And to this day
I've lived with that
feeling of disgust,
and shame, and guilt,
and I can't
even believe I've
managed to get
this all out.

In the silence,
I know that my secret
has melted,
At least a little,
a certain lightness
reawakening like a phoenix
from the darkness,

maybe I can fly now,
coast on air currents
to lands and experiences
I have never been able to
discover before—
too hesitant, too guarded,

but that dream of
future dissipates
as I am lost in the tenderness
of an embrace,

lost to the sheer
exhaustion of unchaining
this secret,

lost to the present.

The Secret (Part 2)

2009-04-27T22:13:00.002-05:00

Why can't I tell my secret?
What am I afraid will
happen if I let slip
whatever it is I have
been hiding?

Dissolution of my self?
No.
I have lived with
this weight for too
long, soul already
transformed.

Dissolution of a
particular image I
present to others?
Yes. The "I"
presented will cease
to exist, foundations
of a life lived
in tatters at the
feet of a new "I."

But what is so bad
about this, I wonder
thinking in what
seems to be an
infinite, impenetrable
pitch.

Living a lie cannot
be a good thing,
living with an ordinary
mask while your
face underneath is
scarred,

while underneath you
possess deep lines
of pain, and eyes
that shimmer with
gained wisdom,

all masked for alabaster
skin and dull eyes,
products of common
culture.

Yet in this accepted
beauty can be comfort:

on days when you
look outside and see spring,
verdant green and
wild birds, locked in ritual
rebirth,

one days when you
step outside and feel
the warmth against flesh,
and melt inside,
unconcerned with the
past, on a path bent
toward a better life.

And then the sunshine
fades, the lush green
lost to mysterious black,
renewal now distant
memory,

arriving at a night
like to-night, when
history and memory
blossom, Venus
Fly Traps devouring
your content.

The masked benefits
lost to your difference
in the most reverberating
ways, lost to your
difference with every
bit of acrid emotion on
tongue and in air.

I should just tell my
secret.

I should just tell it,
Past poets, listen
to me!; maybe if
I utter to the dead
first, letting it escape
my lips will not
seem too hard.

But not now, not
here. Tomorrow,
tomorrow I will tell.

The Secret (Part 1)

2009-04-27T18:11:00.003-05:00

It is nighttime
and I feel this
burden weighing
me down,
counterbalance
to crisp air that
livens spirit.

I just want to fly like
nightbirds fly,
smooth and resolute
on air currents,

for a meal,
for exercise,
for no reason
whatsoever,
apparent to
anybody else,
just to glide
and be at peace,
an object with
fewer faces.

But I cannot.

I am stuck,
unable to fly
and yet not rooted
to the Earth,
somehow inorganic,
just walking
erratically on the surface,
gravel giving under my
feet and shoal,
shifting as I step:

perhaps this is what
humanity is after all,
burdened by the
weight of injustices.

My chains?
A secret I know
I must tell
and yet every time
I try to let the words
escape,

free form
butterfly dance,

this contorted
look dominates
my faces, soft
features lost
to a monstrosity,

and I fall silent.

After Fame

2009-04-27T07:03:00.003-05:00

All the glory,
all the grandeur:

your name etched
in stone,

in trophies glinting
from too much
polish,

in the roar of
a hundred thousand
teenage fans,

the myth of
immortality.

Your fame never
lives on forever,
all the grandeur
evaporating into
the air for someone
else to capture
later,

and you are
left to stand, naked
in vast open spaces,
alone, and you
must not buckle
at your knees
out of emotional
mix: confusion,
sadness, anger,

this unmistakable
instability in
the wake of
idolization's statue
torn down,

must learn to live
in the fugue,
you must learn to
live it, or you
will falter
like so many
before you,

superficiality cracks
and you only have
memory left,
prepare yourself.

Retribution

2009-04-22T19:09:00.002-05:00

A line of cars zips by,
people knowing that
they drive in their
own funeral procession:

Fumes of the exhaust pipe
drift into the air,
carrying pollutants to
linger, listlessly, in
the atmosphere.

Mother Nature intones:
They must pay!
And so, slowly,
temperature rises,
fueling monster storms
that claim countless lives
and melting icecaps,
a sign of impending Deluge
that will claim
countless more.

Even Nature herself suffers--
vibrant coral reefs now
lifeless onyx, once
lively animals, scurrying
with abandon, ready now to
take their penultimate
breaths.

Humanity so imbued in
Nature that Nature must
be remade, uncompromising
wasteland, dissolution
to mystery in transition,
and then the blossoming
of a new aesthetic, rebirth.

Expected process arriving
too early, too soon for a
gradual evolution, as
unconcerned humanity
turns it into retribution.

Can it be halted, or better
yet: reversed, ominous path
restored to former glory?

Yes, though humanity must
remake itself wholly,
not Nature. For only
in new habits can a coexistence
occur.

While I hope,
while I envision myself
in this remade life,
I see the steady
funeral procession;
I see smoke billow
from factory mouths;
I see the haze of light
obscure Nature' nightlights

and I tumble from the
high cliffs of hope into
the icy sea of the future.

Oh, humanity,
Oh, Nature,
reconcile please-- I cry
and then I sink under
the surface. so small
in a vast sea.

The Beginning of the Rest of My Life

2009-04-21T20:45:00.001-05:00

The process of applying for colleges has proved to be an enlightening experience. As I am suspended now in a bubble of anticipation and self-doubt, my emotional state is difficult to describe. Not nervous, and yet not hopeful, I feel I am waiting at the most important departure point in my life, headed off for a journey that will carry me for two years to my bachelor's degree and further into academia and the rest of my life. This feeling I struggle to describe reverberates in the core of my body, present when I am alone on Twitter or idling before drifting off to sleep. It is a feeling I remember from when I was in school, and quite frankly, it frightens me. This fright is not imbued in the essence of this feeling, but in the implications it has for me. For I know this feeling has both the capacity to send my ideas and questions through labyrinths, emerging with truths. But it also has the capacity to make me buckle at me knees, fixated in one spot as thoughts swirl around in a murky haze.

How does any of this relate to the process of college applications and admissions? A great deal, given my personal history with college and success (or lack thereof, depending on the benchmarks you use to determine success).

I began my college experience earlier than most, leaving high school with my diploma after my sophomore year to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, the only college that offers B.A. degrees almost solely for those who skip 1 or 2 years of high school. I began in the summer of 2006 when I was 17 years old, filled with boundless ambition and hope for a future. How could I not be? I had been accepted on a two year, full-tuition merit based scholarship and was getting a chance to make the academic experience that I wanted for the first time in my life. If I was anything other than naive, how would I have transformed myself (and been transformed, for this was both an external and internal process) so completely?

This first moment of transformation came as I took my first gender studies class. My initial interest was in neuroscience, a bold and gutsy path that I knew would take at least 12 years of schooling, but in taking that first gender studies class, I found an intellectual freedom and mystery that I could not find in the sciences. It was in that class that I completed a qualitative research project on formations of gay identity, interviewing four gay men of various ages on experiences coming out and other ideas regarding sexuality. It was an intellectual awakening, demonstrating for me the depth of curiosity that carries my body forward and upright, even as I live in a painful, marginal place. But it was also the first opportunity that I had to academically reflect on my own sexual experiences. I was liberated by that project in a way I hadn't been before, but I was also forever bound to an academic discipline and path I wouldn't realize for another year.

The next semester proved to good smoothly enough as I excelled academically and socially. It was a point of calm and contentment in my life. But the summer of 2007 proved the beginning of an evolution in thought and spurned a series of revelations that sit with my today. Staying on campus with only 20 other people in a town of 10,000 allowed for a lot of time to let thoughts ferment. The first of which was the fact that I had to transfer after the end of the 2007-2008 school year. I would be done with my scholarship. The school, only 40 years old, offered little financial aid. And anyway, I wanted to transfer: the isolation of this place was growing more noticeable as each day came and passed. As I poured everything I had into trying to change the campus climate, few other people responded. This pronounced apathy for a student body population so bright was disconcerting. By the second semester of my sophomore year, I had isolated myself from social activism, and all but a few friends, drifting between phenomenal creative bursts of energy and intellectual detachment.

I thought that Tulane University would be a reawakened, centered in a city that was going through a dramatic rebirth itself. But my expectations were shattered by profound apathy of the student body population and inequities so unreasonable that I didn't know where to begin to change them. While I befriended an active group of feminists, this small group did not justify an overwhelming feeling of alienation and disappointment in seeing a city so magical suffer so much. And so I ended up where I am in rural Louisiana, contemplating my future and applying to a new batch of schools.

Which has gotten me to thinking about the following:

If the schools I am applying to value only my grades as a measure of academic success, then I am not interested in attending those universities. I may not have a distinguished GPA, but if you ask for a letter of recommendation from any professor, they would be willing to provide it. Learning, for me, is so much more than a qualitative measure. It is a life-long process. What I gain from texts and conversations does not end in the classroom; every bit of knowledge becomes a stitch in a larger intellectual tapestry.

My imperfect academic record doesn't reflect my inability to understand materials presented or a lack of effort. Instead it represents the weight that this knowledge holds on my shoulders, along with the the above situations that I described specific to the climate of each university. I would never lose this knowledge and yet I cannot deny its burdens. Fringe knowledge does more than just chip facades off houses. They collapse whole structures, deconstructing the most fundamental conceptions of society. In this annihilation, you want nothing more than to resurrect civilization with your knowledges, queering it (imagine an inversion of the margins to the center).

How can you not struggle when you invest yourself in this mission but never see results?

How can you not struggle when you feel alone and empty, with nothing else but your ideas to cherish?

How can you not struggle when you possess terrible truths while you watch others dance blindly around you?

I have learned that the knowledge I gained is powerful and treasured, but if it is all I have and if it fails to be utilized, then I ultimately have nothing else, save an empty field for me to ruminate in. Which is not to say I should avoid alienation all together: for in these moments of disconnect I have discovered the most about myself. The fury, the abjection, the confusion, that little light of the future-- naked emotions have awoken my Muse unlike any other time in my life. But to linger for long periods exposed causes me to falter, as qualitative methods and personal anecdotes demonstrate.

I do believe that I now know what I want better than I have known before. And yet I wonder if these new schools are just like the old ones: the isolation, the administrative frustration, unfettered apathy. IF they are, how can I temper the alienation and move forward? There are no more do-overs in this college "game." I cannot afford to go to any other schools.

I wonder if perhaps this alienation will be a permanent fixture for the rest of my life, given the knowledges and truths I have gained and treasure. The only way to escape this, it seems, is to look forward. To look forward and see academia and universities as sites of renewed political, social and spiritual transformation. Yes, to contribute to apathy's atrophy is a most difficult task. Culture has evolved in such a way that the material carries more weight in daily lives than the immaterial. But maybe I just need to change my own mindset. This change I seek isn't about me at all, at least not in the long-term. It is about everyone else, the countless mass of marginalized populations long ignored and subjugated to the horrors of human savagery. If I sacrifice my chance at contentment, everyone can benefit from unbridled passion and a firm, steady voice.

Exactly what this change encompasses, or if I will ever end up doing anything worthwhile, remains to be seen. But for now at least, I can only wait, hoping that the colleges and universities I have applied to have seen beyond narrow-minded qualitative methods of college admissions and viewed my personal narrative and recommendations are central to my ability to contribute to the academic and social community. If they have, perhaps this social change I yearn for is already taking shape.

Oh, how I hope so.
Oh, how I hope so.

Our Tree

2009-04-20T23:47:00.000-05:00

I sit in the shadow
of a tree that existed
before the American
Revolution, in its trunk
somber realities of a past:

my own self imagining
a noose draped around
one of its sturdy branches,
Executioner ready to send
bodies limp, hanging from
this accessory to murder.

Yes.
This tree is an accessory
to murder, though it lacks
conceptions of Right and
Wrong, it stood as the post
for denigration of a people.

And yet we treasure it,
I treasure it, under its
majestic shadow I wonder
where is the axe clutched
in calloused hands to tear
it down?

There will never be one.
Oh how I feel uneasy about this!

Beautiful knotted branches,
trunk so firmly rooted I cannot
fathom its atrophy;
the promise of history,
unknown and unexpected,
as I scour branches for
glimmers of memory.

And there it is:
beauty is turned upside
down as I tumble, through Time,
the Antebellum emerging from
gravestones, more beauty caked
in layers over lines of savagery:
it is unmistakable.

How can reconcile its elegance
with the facade it exists in?
Should I, even, I wonder as
I continue to unspin thoughts
carefully, thinking this unsettling
feeling a motivator toward
something great.

I stare up again, but cannot
think of an answer, not now,
not here, I want to let
this beauty fade.

Light

2009-04-20T01:10:00.005-05:00

Three beams of sunshine
escape through holes in
the woolen sky, falling
slanted, away from the valley
and onto forested mountainsides,
a sign, from whom?
for what purpose?

I wonder as I stand in that valley,
gazing upward at illuminated wilds.
Am I to go there, I ask myself,
playing into my ego, I ask further:
is it a sign for me?

(Must not believe in mythos.
Must not believe in divinity.
Always negate the idea of Fate.)

And yet the scene is otherworldly,
murky sky pierced
by the way of heavens,
a guide toward a future,
divine determination I have
tried to escape entirely,
manifest fully in a single image.

(Other voice presses to speak.
Urgent release of information.
Pressing. Pushing. Pulling
apart phantasms.)

"Merely" a scene of natural beauty,
wholly random,
testament to the Bang
and evolution of everything,
but nothing more.
No god. No divinity.
Period.

Yet this certainty feels uncertain,
core of body shaken
by the lingering scene:

Light illuminates a place
I have never been, as
I dream to unroot myself
from this valley, waving
good-bye to endless facades,
rediscovering myself and
truth(s), Lies left tethered to
lawns-- Rebirth, now!

(Coincidence, there is such a thing.)

But it all feels so meaningless
otherwise. This other explanation--
so whole, mysterious,
orb, swirling with undetermined
gaseous matter, transfixed,

I want that feeling again:
alive again, blood flowing as
the limits of my body shift.

(Go up the mountain! Worry
not for the explanation of things.)

Does it really matter where
my decision came from? I pause,
rummaging through thoughts as
I settle on 'no', wondering why
I haven't escaped this contrived
existence for a lived life.

While I receive no answer,
I think of something else in
the process:
THERE IS NOTHING ELSE
HERE FOR ME!!

I must leave.

(To creativity,
to mystery,
to pain, to rediscovery.)

In an instant, holes of
the woolen sky are filled
and I am set on my
journey, like my future
its circumstances are
unexplained.

Inner Turmoil

2009-04-18T23:51:00.002-05:00

The Kid

2009-04-13T22:18:00.003-05:00

He writes his first story at eight.
The words trip over each other,
rife with mis(s)pelling
and grammatical (,) errors.
But he captures something
even the most celebrated authors
in history cannot.
Besting Borges,
Cervantes, and Chaucer,
he captures the spirit of youth.

Lacking labyrinth or epic quest,
there is indefinitely
more possibility: in the prose
itself, in the characters
represented, in the landscape,
however familiar it is.

And more,
watch in a year or two;
different placement of
the comma, evolving language,
new inner landscape
destined to germinate like
a newly planted seed.

Why is it we celebrate the developed
but not the developing?
Yes, this child never experienced
the powerful exaltation
arising from abjection
in pitch-black nights, sad shadow
in an expansive plane of existence.

But he sees this darkness
around him and, more importantly,
gets there somehow.

I may not be wise myself.
I possess no accolades collecting
dust on some lofty shelves.
I hold no advanced degree.
And yet I live and listen to everybody's
imperfect masterpieces, willing
to give a kid a place next to Borges,
knowing both epics hold keys to
unlocking mysteries of this untamed
jungle.

In the Shadow of the Gallows (Of Our Family Tree)

2009-04-13T21:57:00.007-05:00

Hide and Seek (for self)

2009-04-09T19:37:00.002-05:00

I am playing this game alone,
hide and seek--

(slowly)

one one thousand
two one thousand, and on,
thought but not spoken,

nine one thousand...
ready or not, here I come,

each syllable reverberating
with questions:
who am I counting for? and
how is it this 'who' has split from
me? --

linguistic knots, puzzlement
denying smooth flow,
pentameter of past poets gone

(pause, rummaging
through the attic)

puzzlement, again,
private play and rapid growth
of tangled unexpected:

where to look, where to look
I wonder as my hands unmask my
face.

Blues orbs dart, this way, and that,
trying to catch a glinting clue,

but uncertainty is impenetrable
by human sight

(so I linger, what else?)

suspended specimen in fluid filled
mason jar

I want to see it crack, barrier
trickling out and pooling through
hairline fracture,

but who wouldn't want to feel
whole,
or just not missing something?

Limbs don't go slack,
mind doesn't settle for an uncomplicated
picture--
give me Dali and ask for critiques,
(I never settle for the crudely drawn
stick house)--

repeat:
who is it I am looking for?
how did it vanish and when?
and where is it hiding?

Answers, Heavens,
give me answers,
pllllllleassseeeeeeeee,
desperation etched
prominently in each tone,

because soon I might just abandon
this chance at rediscovery
and settle for a "new I,"

I am tired of playing games,
tired of playing games,
tired of games,
ready or not, here I come:

still...
echoing...

(imaginary figments!?
THE REAL?!)

For Inspiration

2009-04-05T23:11:00.001-05:00

I speak to you Muse
and ask you to summon
all of yourself for the
most important of tasks.

Temper not anger,
soothe not sadness,
remove not the uncertainty
that leaves footpaths shifting:
these are your wondrous tools.

Look not at the center but at
the place where society
bends and frays,
bends and frays:
in the margins you will find
what you need staring back
at you with wide sunken eyes.

Be not afraid of the gaze
that pierces through flesh.

Be not afraid of the wash
you are throwing yourself into
as you tumble and tumble
through the world.

Be not afraid, hesitant nor complacent
and your mind will light up,
fireworks of thoughts, flowing
from your mouth like a steady steam.

But hurry, for if you wait too
long, all will vanish
and you will have nothing.

Quote from Sylvia Plath, August 1950

2009-04-04T03:03:00.002-05:00

I am drawn to this quote over and over again. For some strange reason, it resonates so deeply with me, perhaps because of the intellectual insight (for someone aged 18), for what it foreshadows (suicide, of course), and for what it seems to contrast with later in her life. In any case, here is that passage, no. 7, from pg. 9 of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, as edited by Karen V. Kukl:

"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. The second is life. And when it is gone, it is dead. But you can't start over with a new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand...hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die."

Temples (through an open window)

2009-04-04T02:38:00.000-05:00

If you don't believe in God
what is your temple? I am asked
as I proclaim, often nimbly,
my religious beliefs.

The world, I say softly,
do you need a single
spot to find solace and peace
of mind, to come together for
common purpose, to find yourself:

what about the willow perched
on the banks of a babbling brook,
contemplative counterbalance
to water chatter,

the square where we all rather
to rally together against injustice,
brusk cries, cascading walls of sound
rushing through a city,

or any number of places that
in thinking about them you are
touched, moved beyond your
rooted state and forced to branch
out.

Beginning Reflection on Religion

2009-04-04T01:34:00.002-05:00

The following is something I wrote a while back regarding religion. I am atheist. A few poems that should be coming up soon have to deal with the faith of atheism and some other interesting topics:

"Why should I be force-fed
morality I remember wondering
at 10, not in those exact words
(can one ever remember exact words,
save savants?)
but in the essence,
just 10 and wrestling with a lion,
wanting to find my own morality.

I should not be force-fed,
I exclaimed then,
I should not be force-fed.

Foundations crumbled
in the blink of an eye:
sin abandoned and so too
Christian morality,
the extinguishing of fire
and crumbling of
the ascending stairway."

Seaside

2009-04-04T01:30:00.000-05:00

Water lapping at my feet
I am transported to another world, not
of my own creation but of another

lyric(s);
ebb and flow of water,
collect, overbalance, and fall,
collect and collect, that is all.
Woolf in the waves,
wrapped up in evocative language

that speaks to the weary soul I possess,
tired from constant uncertainty
building from the displaced sensation,
nights in bed,
head resting on pillow with sheep remedy,
useless now, the only known
'comfort' from the deluge.

But now, channeling Woolf, I am...
free, in some sense at least,
free to dream of another world,
free to witness soul melt
to prose-poetry, enraptured

And so I lie by the ocean shore,
daytime passing me by,
unabashedly, on its
daily course, dreaming in her
essence:

if this is all life could be,
just think what a content person
I'd be, just think of the ease.

The thought clings to the
water droplets on my feet,
but I notice at once the
first signs of night approaching,
as the sky colours began to deepen--
purples, reds and oranges illuminating
the cloud puffs.
I begin to doubt this statement,

postmodern theory imbued in my cells,
I begin a dangerous process,
deconstruction of self
and the excavation of lies.

Whether or not I have wished it,
daytime peace disintegrates to
jungle adventure, last rays of sun
vanishing to pitch,
"that is all" losing volume to
questions fit for Atlas.

Walking back to our bungalow,
feeling sand in toes, last marker
of lazy day guided by whimsical
imagination, the process of
deconstruction unravels

in my head questions battle
one another for control,
answers emerging from shadows,
only to be shot down by a force
most powerful-- Doubt.
And yet it becomes clear, with each step
in the sand, the ultimate
question to-night is:
Do I just want to dream forever?

Lament from Mount Meru

2009-04-04T01:10:00.000-05:00

In shadow of Mount Meru
I lose myself,
all that colours me
washed out
as I remember him:

six months earlier
he stood in this same shadow,
sweat on brow from
tropical air,
fulfilling a wish
in the penultimate scene
of his life,

now examining this
ancient temple in the lush
Cambodian lands,
brilliance and mystery
mimicked in his own life;
or the happy
moments at least--

I break from the image
of him as I try to imagine
what he was thinking
as he stood before this
divine structure

knowing he had only
three months left,
inoperable pancreatic cancer
a deadly yeast quickly
expanding to vital organs,

but I cannot imagine it:
I am not dying too soon.
I am in the prime of
my life, living without
any concern for the Reaper
to whisper, "it's time."

I just stare at the
unfathomable beauty,
unable to pen an adequate
word for what I seen,

I just stare at the
unfathomable beauty
and think how much more
I have left to see.

In an instant, I realise,
maybe my thoughts are
not much different from
his, though motivations
are different:

we all live for great moments
and once we reach the
pinnacle, we wonder what
else is out there,
if there is anything more
beautiful, more wondrous,

there is no way not to look
at Angkor Wat and think
how much further toward
happiness can the soul ascend,

even for the dying,
chants of ages practically
ring out in heavy air.

Snapshot

2009-04-04T00:16:00.003-05:00

Staring into the sunset, I find myself:
in the warm hues I rediscover my
conscience, guided by the rhythmic
beating of my heart, thump thump,

and at once I feel lost, swallowed
up by unforgiving landscape,
swampy bayou, humidity laden
air, and worse yet, crushed, a
primrose plant in the hand of a
giant, losing what I once had: my form.

I want it all back,
I howl, wolf-like, like in storybooks,
snout upturned to a sliver of moon.

I WANT IT ALL BACK,
louder this time, angry torrent,
endless stream of mind's dissatisfaction.

No longer able to look at the sun
setting directly on a flat horizon,
I grab my camera and begin capturing
moments in time,

capturing them to remember,
in each viewing,
the day I rediscovered what was lost,

capturing them to remember,
in each viewing, desire
to bend the boundaries of
society like a master of glass work,
towards ethereal beauty.

And then sun sets, and dreams fade,
and all I have are these photographs
to remind me of what I want
but cannot seem to have:

caged bird who desires
migration across continents
to test the limits of his flight.

Rather than becoming inspired,
I just grow more desolate, the weight
of centuries and injustices pushing
at my sides, slowly sucking out all the air,
delirium the next step,

I find myself
closer to the precipice of madness,
sooner to become a 21st century
"Howl," best minds of a generation
lost on some otherworldly tangent.

Where is a way out?
Where is a way out?

Outside cloaked in darkness,
I just look at the photographs again,
but nothing new comes to me,
no resolution, no solace,

sunrise, sunrise, bring something new,
I plead, I moan, until I can no more
and peter out, to silence, to sleep.

Seeing Eye

2009-04-03T19:05:00.000-05:00

Need Help in My Upcoming Trip To NYC/Philly

2009-04-01T20:21:00.004-05:00

Some weeks ago, I decided to book a plane ticket out of New Orleans to New York from April 30th to May 4th. At that time, I had expected to get a number of hours and make more money at my job at Books-A-Million, being told that the company was doing quite well and that hours would be plentiful. However, the past two weeks have proven to be especially hard for our store, and hours have been cut. As a consequence, I have made less hours than expected and that is going to continue for the conceivable future. I have tried looking around for other jobs to supplement hours, but the (sad) fact is that there simply aren't that many opportunities available, no matter what Governor Bobby Jindal says.

The dilemma arises from the fact that the airfare (which was approximately 200 dollars) is non-refundable. To not go on this trip--which have fashioned not as a vacation but as a personal reawakening and and intellectual rejuvenation--seems to me a waste of the money which I did put down on the trip and seems a bad move for my personal growth and overall happiness over the course of the next few months.

The truth be told is that this trip is necessary for me. I have been living in rural Louisiana since the beginning of January, much to my chagrin. I would have moved to a big city straight out of my not withdrawal from Tulane on the basis of financial issues, but I did not have the resources to do so. When I found that my (now boy)friend was also moving out of New Orleans, I jumped on the opportunity to avoid the Old Man Winter's icy breath. And so I ended up in Houma, Louisiana, a small city of approximately 45,000 that is both deeply Catholic and conservative, filled with Southern hospitality and a quiet sensibility. Most of the people born here never really leave, and so culture seems stagnant, mirroring in many the ways the hot humid weather that lingers for more than half the year.

I thought I would be sticking around for just a few months, but in talking to my boyfriend, it seems he, born in Cuba and a transplant to Southern Louisiana at the age of 6, is more content to stay in smaller town. I agree with him in that respect, as I see he is more focused and diligent than he was in New Orleans, but this rural life is not for me. I have been studying gender and sexuality studies, am interested in environmental and LGBT activism, enjoy theatre, arts, and music, and find no greater passion than discovering new streets and sights by walking around. Houma, Lousiana affords me no such opportunities and I have grown to feel stagnant intellectually, lacking a sense of where I am headed. (And while I am not one for believing in modernist paths forward, favouring a meandering route that I am reminded me as I read any of Virginia Woolf's novels, I must move in some direction.)

That is why this trip is very important for me and I have placed very specific objectives of what I need to do myself:

First, I need connect with new activists on all different fronts, from LGBT folks such as @harveymilk on Twitter, to environmental activists, to radical political activists involved with Students for a Democratic Society. I want to be able to bring an activist project to the Houma area, but I need ideas and inspirations from others who gotten more opportunities to work hard. The hardest part of any project, in my opinion, is getting it started. Being able to do this on a face-to-face basis would speed up the process. Even if it more of an academic project, such as interviewing LGBT individual living in rural Louisiana and using that data for later use, then I can get tips and suggestions on this.

The second objective is to reawaken my muse. Though it is by no means burnt out right now, considering the poem I just wrote today, much of my writing is inspired by the sights and sounds of city life. In immersing myself in these cities, I will find new imagery and imaginings for poetry, expanding my depth of focus and capacity for figurative language. Part of this project entails checking out new art, drama, or cinema to gain a sense of what other artists are doing and build ideas off of them. The Houma area lacks any real organized art community as far as I am concerned.

The third and final objective is to be able to explore some colleges and universities in the NYC/Philly area to get a sense of options I may have for Spring 2010 or Fall 2010. (Fall 2009 options have already passed.) I don't know if I will actually end up at any of these colleges/universities, but want to have options above all else. I am considering CUNY schools like Hunter or Queens College, and places like UPenn and Swarthmore around Philly. It's one thing to research schools online but another entirely to visit and capture the esseence of a place--sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling.

So what can any of you do to help? Perhaps you can contribute a place for me to stay (piece of floor, couch, whatever) for some of the days of my trip, an occasional meal, a spare Metro card or bus fare, anything at all that you see appropriate, even if it is talking to friends and fellow crusaders of all-that-is-noble-and-just in this world. I am aware that this request is a bit unorthodox, but I want to be able to expand the boundaries of being as I put in my most recent poem. This trip will help me to do that.

Let me know what you would be willing to do.

Willow

2009-04-01T10:34:00.003-05:00

Everyday I attend
to my willow:
with gentle words,
nurturing, I seek
to preserve its
beauty, finding
it even in the severe
lilt of scaly leaves.

I am not afraid of sadness.

Everyday I attend
to my willow:
not that it needs tending,
tenacious roots
reaching deep into
soil, though
not far from lake,
this bread basket
is rich.

Sadness imbues resolve
into life.

Everyday I attend
to my willow:
as I furiously scribble
on the page, words
somehow come to me,
spongy mind memories
diffusing from code:

I record colours from
the sunsets set in deep
purple and indeterminable
pink,

I record footsteps in time,
soft thuds against pavement
and gravel, in meandering
fashion,

I record, most piercingly,
soul sadness and soul
resolve, abjection present
in every letter, special tint.

Everyday I attend
to my willow:
seeing myself in its image
and wanting something,
cascade of quixotic ideas
as waves lap the shore gently,
and gulls swoop overhead.

I find the limits of sadness
and remake the boundaries of being.

Reflections in Construction

2009-03-27T17:33:00.002-05:00

AS I sit by glass,
I notice the inlaid cross
on the apartment building
looming over the
construction scene,
as they tear up something
that didn't need fixing,

or at least something
I didn't see as broken:
sure, cracked pavement
and uneven sidewalks
casting surreal nighttime
shadows,

but such is the essence
of this city,
describe dually as
the city time forgot
and the city that has
been breathing forever--
heavy and laboured
through weather--
but always breathing,

and now they are destroying
it in the name of a
sickening word:
gentrification, acrid on
tongue, gentrification,
I repeat with maddened intensity,

contemporary capitalistic
kitsch, always ending up
looking inauthentic,
Cobblestones!
Cobblestones on Oak St.

It has never been broken,
melting pot of citizens
frequenting local business,
but now they're replacing
this strip of pavement
for broken bricks better
suited for horses.

At what cost? I ask as
functional concerns
dissipate into ethical
considerations.

Why are we spending money
on a street of the city
that seems bustling, day
and night, when other wards
remind me of grotesque
post-apocalyptic imaginings:

symbolic markings for dead
still visible on fronts of collapsed
houses, cracked windows,
untamed grasses reminiscent
of wilds, startling darkness
as sun descends beneath the horizon,

taken wholly to represent
gross injustice that has not
petered after Katrina,
sad fact that the people who
made the city,

the people who struggled
under the weight of slavery
in Quarter houses,
terrible tales of being stuck
in ovens because of indiscretions,

are subjugated once again,
under a different cloak, yes,
but subjugated once again,
left abandoned, out of the city
or in abject conditions,
barely living and nothing is
being done.

Incompetence has
not faltered, broken levees
replaced with fast fading
dreams,
the city that stood forever
seeming more forgotten
with each day.

AS I stare at the scene,
confusion bending to anger
bends once again to sadness,
remembering canvassing
on election day for Obama,
as I was in one of those
apocalyptic neighbourhoods.

Every single person I talked to
was going to vote,
each of them expressed renewed
optimism in the wake of failed policies,
and yet the sight today
reminds me that the national
political arc doesn't necessarily
represent local realities:

governors, mayors, congressmen
are responsible for the welfare
of the people, especially a people
so marred by disaster,
and they have failed,

as they replace usable pavement
with cobblestones, in the
name of gentrification
they demonstrate their commitment
to tourism but not reality.

My heart breaks, staring at the
construction workers who could
be reviving culture rather than
replacing it,

but I must go now.
I no longer belong to the city--
this cannot be my fight--
but please, somebody else
take up arms.

Surreal shadows and
unmatched spirit depend on it.

Listen, I am Feminist Too: A Queer Male Perspective

2009-03-20T23:55:00.003-05:00

“I hate to say it, but the images of high school come rushing forward, images of the bigger, stronger guys, roosters in every right, images of who I should have been by social standards. In an instant I scoff at such an image, imagining myself sweating inside some rooster costume, wishing I could just use my brain, that I could just let my voice, steady and effortless, be something I am proud of. But then I realize I am not the rooster anymore; instead I am naked, stark naked, in the hallways, homo tattooed on my stomach, intellectual emblazoned on my arm; and all I can hear are the laughs, uproarious, as a new tattoo appears suddenly on my face, lachrymose, the perfect description for my state of mind.”

These words were part of a story I wrote over the summer. While it was a work of fiction, and the words themselves were an obvious dramatisation of actual events within the story, their core holds an undeniable truth in my own life. I do not write what I do not feel most strongly. I came out as gay at the age of 16 in October of 2005. I was in my second year of high school. For three years prior, I had been engaged in an inner battle, a battle that has shaped the very person I am as I put these words on a page. The quote at the top of the page reflected, for a time at least, the intense self-consciousness I felt over my sexuality. Before I came out, I was worried about other peoples’ responses. I was worried about being rejected, worried about being cast out to sea on some lonely raft, by all people, even those closest to me. But I was also worried about another threat, the threat of the roosters, of violence against me by men because of my proclaimed sexuality.

This fear of rejection and violence did not come without an intense period of reflection. Before I came to define the person that I was as gay, I was involved in a lengthy reflective process over what it meant to be gay. I came to find that gay meant only that I was attracted to other guys, but that it was also composed of a constellation of noticeable gendered behaviours reinforced for at least a century. It became clear that the homosexual was an anatomically male body with a female psyche, an idea developed at the very beginning of the creation of the modern homosexual by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the late 1800s (Terry 43). While such a distinction is less articulated in society today, the stereotypical images of the gay man as effeminate, characterised by a particular voice, mannerisms, dress, and interests, remain. In this realisation, I began a self-consciousness process of evaluating my own actions and behaviours. What types of clothing was I wearing? What were my mannerisms? Did I fit the stereotypes? I began policing my own behaviours out of fear of being ridiculed or harmed.

Nevertheless, in October 2005 I reached a point where I felt that articulating a gay identity publicly would at least free from a silence that was tearing me up psychologically, allow me to find a community I belonged to. While there were positive effects from coming out, the emotions expressed in the quotation did not disappear in any sense. By coming out, I did not free myself from the fear of rejection or ridicule; if anything, these feelings were intensified. In brandishing myself as homosexual, I made myself an open target of examination and judgment without fully having the courage to articulate what I believed. In this state of fear and concern for myself, my state of mind—lachrymose as I put it in the story—led to the development of my feminist consciousness. The purpose of this essay is thus to define feminism in the traditional sense, utilizing various theorists, and explore a new feminist ideology that may seem more congruous to my own identification as queer and male.

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, feminism is both a “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes,” and “organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.” The two key aspects of this definition are “of the sexes” and “women’s rights and interests.” The first is important because in its definition of gender equality, it uses the word sexes, a term which immediately comes to my mind as meaning the “uncomplicated” categories of male and female, thereby limiting access to feminism to those of specific genders. As Riki Wilchins points out in several chapters of GENDERqUEER: voices beyond the sexual binary, anyone who chooses not to identify as male or female have “completely vanished from civil discourse” and have “for political purposes…ceased to exist” (54). This is erasure is further supported in the definition by making women the centre of organised activity, because it fails to acknowledge those who do not identify as women who nonetheless deal with gender inequities on a daily basis.

This definition of feminism is not merely confined to a dictionary; it has pervaded feminist writings since the 1950s. One of the earliest examples of this is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a hallmark text of feminism. In it, she boldly challenges male privilege and explores women’s status as Other, lacking any subjectivity of their own. Revolutionary for the time, it clear now the ways in which de Beauvoir’s theory is limited and how it is tied to the dictionary definition of feminism. The first clear tie is de Beauvoir’s reliance on both sexes, whereby men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed. This idea is demonstrated clearly when she states that “he is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (44) and that “the division of the sexes is a biological fact” (47). The second is in her heterocentric tilt. Throughout the introductory chapter, she describes heterosexual relationships exclusively and seems unable or unwilling to challenge the basic idea that the feminine is the object of masculine desire and vice versa. In supporting a particular ideology of gendered inequities that places women as the object of feminism, de Beauvoir unwittingly reinscribes a heterosexual matrix and denies voices outside of this model the chance of being heard.

Feminist theory evolved in short order after de Beauvoir, but such a transformation, rather than being wholly positive, brought women as the object of feminism to a new extreme. It is true that lesbian theorists challenged compulsory heterosexuality. Nobody better attacks heterosexual privilege than Adrienne Rich in her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” However, she continues to assert women as objects of feminism, and particularly lesbian women as objects of feminism. Like other theorists of this nature, Rich also emphasizes something called “women-identification,” which does not include merely lesbian sexual interaction but also “women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions and community” (199). Another theorist, Monique Wittig, in “One is Not Born a Woman,” goes a step further in asserting that “lesbianism provides for the moment the only form in which we [women] can live freely” (20). Thus women remained objects of feminism more strongly than eve; men, by and large a homogeneous category of persons, remained the oppressors; and the genderqueer remained completely silenced, hiding in some closet.

But feminism has come to change. Not overnight, of course, but in time feminist ideology has become different, celebrating a postmodern ideology whereby we are all engaged in acts of gender performance. As Riki Wilchin’s says “gender refers not to something we are but something we do, which, through extended repetition and because of the vigorous suppression of all exceptions, achieves the appearance of a sort of coherent psychic substance” (24). What is important in this is that there is no essential masculine and feminine, only social construction of a heterosexual matrix, a matrix that places masculine in a binary with feminine, where all aspects of masculinity are seen in opposition to femininity. Necessary for this deconstruction of the heterosexual matrix, power relations are also reconceptualised through the theorist Michel Foucault. Rather than previous descriptions of power as held by men over women, power is opened up as “power relations,” relationships between people that are “mobile, reversible, and unstable” (Foucault 292). There is no holding of power in one’s hands. Power is no longer evil. This new model of feminist thought no longer “presumes, fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate” (Butler 148). For once, there is chance of a politics that does not belong to a set of “ready-made subjects” (149). Women are not all victims, men are not all powerful, and the truly transgressive—the genderqueer—may very well have the greatest tools for challenging systems of gender inequities.

I have so far articulated at length a traditional view of feminism and provided a sense of this new feminism, but I must now resituate my self in this theory by talking about my own experience. In the beginning, I described how it was that I came to identify as gay and how my exploration of its meaning involved the realisation that to be gay is to be necessarily implicated in a series of perceived gendered behaviours, whether or not you actually practise them. These gendered behaviours arose from the construction of homosexuality in the late 1800s at a psychical inversion, an effeminate mind with a male body. I come back to this point because I believe that it is the foundation for movement into the world of feminist thought. Sexuality is gendered. I do not agree with other theorists (or those in my daily life) who deny a direct link between sexuality and gender. From its historical creation, the homosexual was entirely gendered. Just as important, these gendered stereotypes have persisted to the present day. Through this process of sexual identification, I came to discover gender inequities and became a feminist.

Let me be clear in saying that it is not merely because of my attraction to other men that I am feminist. Nobody just is a feminist by having an attraction or unexamined identity. To become feminist, one must reflect on hir own behaviours, actions and relationships with others. As once a self-identified gay man, I can say wholeheartedly that many other men who identify as gay should not be considered feminists for a very important reason. The heterosexual matrix I have frequently brought up in this discussion is anchored in a binary that places masculine desire for a feminine object and feminine desire to be an object of masculine desire together. Many (self-identified) men who have sex with men do not lose this heterosexual anchor. It takes only a quick glance on the Internet to discover the pervading top/bottom distinction during sexual acts, where one man’s interest lies only in an active role, the penetration of another typically more passive man. Throughout this process, misogyny is perpetuated and rigid sexual boundaries, heterocentric in nature, are re-inscribed.

What is it then that separates me from other men who have sex with men? I think the first lies in my rejection of rigid definition of my own sexual practices. I practise whatever sexual roles I see fit. I certainly have preferences (as I think any person does), but that does not mean I lack flexibility in what I practise, nor do I vigorously assert a particular sexual role. This action is my re-appropriation of sexual desire. It is itself a feminist act in my mind because it seeks to directly challenge the anchor of the heterosexual matrix. My re-appropriation lies in my belief that desire can indeed be flexible, not defined by an oppositional binary. That is to say, masculine desire does not have to be for a feminine object. What this desire can entail is expanded. But it also is my assertion that the sexual partners we have do not have to be the same (in their roles and desires) that it is also challenging. The heterosexual matrix functions on the belief in a constant and fixed identity; my re-appropriation denies constancy.

The other, perhaps the explanation for the switch of my identification from gay to queer, lies in my support and desire to organise politically with diverse groups of people. This identification—with women, transsexuals, and those who are genderqueer—is at the heart of a new feminist ideology. The function of feminism today is not a movement beyond gender oppression; this belief is unachievable and thoroughly utopian. The function of feminism today is thus adopting “games of strategy” to minimise gender inequities (Foucault 298). True games of strategy can, and ought to, be adopted on the level of individual subversion. For example, an individual who plays with gender such that there is no gender constancy is using subversion to challenge gender inequities and a heterocentric framework at a local level. This means of challenging binaries is effective.

However, individual subversion is not the limit of postmodern feminist ideology. While postmodernism makes problematic categories of essence, I think that it is wrong to attribute postmodernism only to individual action. A new politics of being can be created, but it will not function in the same way as modern liberal identity politics. Instead, it will be based in a dynamic process of continual re-evaluation of actions, goals and aims formed by a diverse coalition of individuals. There will be nobody speaking for a monolithic group, people will express their own stories and combat these gender inequities. Women will no longer be the objects of feminism; men will no longer be the only ones who can perpetuate unequal relationships.

As I have demonstrated, my own personal experiences (and the pain inseparable from them) have led to the development of a feminist ideology. From the very beginning of labelling myself as “gay,” I came to find sexuality as entirely gendered, operating within a framework that established the homosexual as psychically inverted. I fretted over the sweaters I wore, the music I listened to, the glances I took. I was afraid of the laughs, of hearing ‘faggot’ uttered, of being harmed because of this framework. My story, supported by postmodern theorists, demonstrates the ways in which this traditional view of feminism is inadequate. Women and men both have erased genderqueer and transsexual from civil discourse. Women have perpetuated hierarchies related to sexuality, ethnicity and economic background. Men too can face gender inequities. The feminist model I have proposed is one in which power is reconceived outside of subject/object distinction. It is a model that entails individual subversion and dynamic political organisation against a heterosexual matrix by all people who have bore witness to gender inequities. We cannot seek to remove ourselves from the world we live in, but being more open and limitless will allow us to more appropriately challenge gender inequities still achingly visible. In believing that “what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic,” we open up so much possibility for feminism and provide me with a chair at the table (Wilchins 36).

Wild(e)s

2009-03-10T17:16:00.022-05:00

Oily rainbow streak,
across the skies of civilization:
nearly invisible
in the whispers of suspicion

to its brilliance today,
since the closet exploded
in 69, sex positions
multiplied in urban space,
Victorian sensibility roiled
in unapologetic pleasure palaces.

Or so the myth goes,
and what a myth it is,
I think, sitting in a rural
Louisiana town, catching
Wifi in a cafe.

Why a myth is the
first question sure to hit
me square in the gut
as I claim the rainbow hasn't been
so smooth (lacking an arc),

but patience, please,
listen to the words that flow
from pen to paper with ease:

it's path did not go from muted
to brilliant across a sky of ages,
and it does not shine now,
though it has had it moments
of radiance in decades disconnected.

A sad fact, yes,
but something better
than deluded sense of things,
not a dismissal of positive
changes but a recognition
of the lengths we still have to go
under a new moniker:
postmodernism in an otherwise
milky indifference.

First thought of support
for the sad fact is simple,

I have sinned,
or so they tell me
on Solemn Sunday,
part of a gray and black mass.

Nietzsche claimed
God dead long ago
but I don't believe him,
listening to words of religious
leaders float hate across
a land that claims
"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

In all too many
nook and crannies
of the country, a single message
sits resiliently:

"God hates fags,"
from the mouth of
a grim reaper
who has no respect
for dead,
uttering damnation as
mourners weep in their own black garb.

Extreme example, yes,
but reflective of the feeling that
lingers under skin and in minds:
aversion to the oily rainbow
as it bends away from expectation.

The second support for
our sad fact,
this bending toward the middle,
postmodernism materializing
in political consciousness,
wondering why the focus
on marriage equality

when young teen boys
wash shame off hands,
having masturbated with
thoughts of sweaty male bodies,
tantalizing stubble against
chins,

when the lesbian woman
cannot listen to the sermon
she wants, foregoing faith
for Sunday cartoons and creamed coffee,

when kids like Lawrence King,
possessing identity
circumflex away from
expectation, are murdered
for nothing more than acting
as they feel comfortable,
reminding us of the Scarecrow
left for dead in Wyoming
a decade earlier,

to the person who sloughs labels--
plethora of possibility in
an opened box--
but is branded, cattle in human form,
as this or that against their
intentions: nomadic and free,

postmodern intensity building,
still more grievances, head
barely bobbing 'bove water,
but necessarily doing so,
soul somehow free from
the weight of deconstruction:

embedded racial issues,
souls who tore down the closet door
in true moment of
rainbow brilliance
now obscured by a snow white sheet,

evident masculine privilege
lost in gender's common conflation
with sexuality,
controlling movements and
lives, male voices silencing
others,

and further unapologetic
misogyny,
(masculine only) men
filled with brazen laughter
at limp-wristed, skinny,
femme "bois"

and Trans-- what is that?
Help me...help me....
help me...echoing from
Bangor to San Diego but given
no response, left to linger
as soul tears itself apart.

All of this as "Masters" of a
this invisible community
sitting in buildings in
big cities contemplating
the next move to gain marriage rights,
tepid in their responses to criticism,
afraid of visibility,

in an instant confirming
what has been said:
the rainbow does not shine today,
save that one day a year
it is acceptable to de-robe
and parade material lust.

And yet, hope has not been lost,
the rainbow never
disappears across blue
sky now dotted with
the purple and pink
hues of puffy cumulus clouds,

Reinvent, Reinvent!
whispers the wind,
Reinvent, reinvent!
But what change?
When? And most importantly:
The result?

Go wild(e), it replies at once,
unfettered, confident,
in tones it says never to be
afraid of the
darkness,
the haze,
the grim,
the opposition expected
to the visibility:

setback is certain,
souls abyss bound
and others still extinguished
by the vehemence of others,

but the price of freedom
has never been greater,
recoloring the rainbow
a more difficult task
than first sending it across the sky,

difficult but important,
daunting, and yet manageable
if remembrance becomes a tool--
the words of past poets,
prize-winning authors--catalysts
for reinvention
and key to the
rapture of the soul,

not just temporary rapture
in sensual touch
or orgasmic shrieks piercing
through otherwise lackluster night,

no, rapture of the soul,
with the body and mind as
weapons, running wild(e)
through the urban alleyways
and winding dirt roads,
running wild(e) with
defiance of everything "natural,"
order disrupted in defense
of the fundamental right to be:

complete fulfillment may
be impossible, but in
recapturing a spirit,
in taking a look deeper
into the realities of a "community,"
unearthing recondite facts and
being unafraid to utter
four simple words:
"this is a lie,"

you once again recolor
the oily rainbow across
the swirling skies of today
and create some chance
of the pursuit of
life, liberty and happiness
to be fulfilled,

listening to the sounds
of Phelps peter to silence,

watching young men
no longer wash shame
off hands after they come
thinking about other guys,

seeing the lesbian woman
utter 'Amen' in confidence
and comfort,

witnessing creation of
a memorial for the
Scarecrows of the ages,
erected in D.C.,

and hearing a response
to the lonely "help me"
that echoes in every state now.

The arc will not be smooth,
the time will not be short,
but it never is:
only in the greatest moments of struggle
is one truly freed.

Reinvention (Part 1)

2009-03-05T17:03:00.005-06:00

Braving bitter winter
I step outside-- Montreal
in mid-January, fresh
snow on the ground, glistening
from the sun, lofty
in the iced sky.

Noticing tiny paw prints in
otherwise untouched snow,
I know a stray dog has beaten
me to acknowledging
the beauty of a new day,

though cold-- temperature hovering
at half the freezing mark--
I am alive for the time in a while,

soul somehow satiated,
perhaps by the freedom this
place does afford me:
zooming underground on
rubber-wheeled trains,
slowly sipping espresso in
a city quarter that has flourished
for centuries.

But I wonder,
traveling underground now,
that it might just be the
vastness of it all--
being a speck on a city plane
that stretches for miles,
a part of something more
powerful than the atmosphere
I created for myself in Berkshire woods:

I escape from everything,
am nothing
(save an individual cell
in a larger honeycomb)
and yet I can become anything
I want to be, once again

breathing in cold air,
I reinvent myself,
exiting the Metro station
in a residential neighborhood
on the outskirts.

Less imposing buildings greet me,
initial calm as I am an explorer now,
determination to discover (something)
alight in my eyes.

Without any constraints,
I linger on each step, catching
the hurried Quebecois French of
school children before arriving
at a market,
petite and ordinary from outside,
but something else entirely inside:

raw and somehow lived,
individual devotion to owned stalls,
energy felt on skin if not
entirely understood in tongue,

nothing less than sensory bliss
grabbing ripened fruit and brie,
brought in from somewhere far off,
but local to me as I see the wrinkles
and graying hairs on dying cells of a
city on a modern tilt.

I want to linger there forever,
bucking Time and everything else that
keeps me moving forward,
but I can only be an explorer
for so long in a city I will soon leave,

and so I moult the label
I affixed to myself,
teneral in a moment of indecision:
what will I be next? I ask myself,
softly though, realising this to be my
own life, journey I have undertaken
alone, for now at least, and
so I battle this question in my mind
before arriving at an answer:
cinephile.

A simple answer, but an answer
nonetheless.

It takes little time to decide on
Le scaphandre et le papillon.
How I have heard of Jean-Dominique,
fated to stroke and lose control of
everything but the blinking of his eyes,
blink blink, reduction of a mind
to the simplest of physical states,

I weep at the sight in the theatre
I braved an uphill climb on
slippery sidewalks to reach.
I weep, not just to myself,
(though I worry every day of
disintegration)
but for a soul so clearly tormented,
trapped in a diving bell with
the bright lights of fashion still
fresh in memory.

Exiting the theatre and out into
the cold again, I realise
I have wept for something else:
the end of my constant reinvention
looming closer with each passing day.

Of A City

2009-03-01T12:26:00.008-06:00

Stoic woman in furs,

snow white, standing

on the corner of Seventh

waiting for the light to change.

Black skinned woman in

the Heights, huddled by

warm oven because of broken

heater, unfixed out of neglect.

They connect, these two,

in a strange way that seems

to connect us all

in this vast expanse of land--

United States of America--

supposed melting pot

That seems unstirred.

Connections in profound

disconnect. And yet connections:

two notes, discordant in

a larger musical piece,

but two notes a part of the same

city

Living together in time that

seems draped with a grey cloth,

not an extended winter but

an indefinite malaise, usual

obligations lost to survival,

survival of more than just people

but of a city.

Woman in furs lives well,

in immaculate loft blocks from

the Guggenheim, celebrating

life every day because she can:

untouched by the downturn,

unfettered, regardless of the

slowing cog of the city.

She stands on the corner

waiting for the light to change

to get to a Broadway play,

Kaufman's new production,

bridging Time, that speaks

on the significance of waltz

variations by one of the one

greatest masters of music.

It's a connection to the

non-mechanical of the city,

the whimsy of erased voices,

of artists struggling,

actions taking on

greater depth than initially thought.

African woman in the Heights

struggling, unlike woman in furs,

because she lacks a well of money,

because she is a transplant to this country,

four years ago to escape

crimson rivers of her land

at the promise of a Dream.

But now that Dream seems faded,

speaking fluent English she has

a job that barely allows her to get by,

collecting every penny and dime in

mason jars on the windowsill in hope

of being able to get lights

for another month,

in hope of having a bit of comfort

just a little while longer.

Abused by a landlord consumed with

the buck, she huddles in front

of the stove but does not weep or

have blood boil because,

now warmed by the oven turned up to 450,

she thinks of where she came from:

in slums that make this look like

a paradise, of seeing her mutilated

cousin's body in the street.

It is the escape of unparalleled sadness

to a land where it is more tolerable,

emotions having greater depth than

initially thought.

And so they are connected

in another way:

discordant in the lives that live, but

living more complexly

than initially seen.

Unfettered by downturn, marked in

snow white excess, and yet

walking in the cold to support

the whimsy of a city that could

so easily become mechanical.

And the refugee in neglected room,

sparsely furnished, but still hopeful,

because of a past not easily read

on the lines of her face,

staring at the glinting mason jars,

looking for something more.

And so as Megastore closes,

and transit rates skyrocket,

and so many people are pushed

to a point where their bodies

seem too much to inhabit:

an atrophy of the soul--

we have two people, discordant because

of positionality, yet reflective of

two extremes of a city.

The person who will never have to struggle,

and the one who struggles because they

made a promise to always

strive for something more,

reminding us that that the malaise

of a city dominates

but does not consume.

Glass and Steel

2009-02-28T11:32:00.008-06:00

This glass and steel,
glint and shine,
of ingenuity and labour built--
but the purpose?

Less transparent, it seems,
nothing but a lie
with its sheen in midday sun,
blinding the world in its glory:
feminist's phallocentrism,
I wonder enveloped at Bryant Park.

That myth of an American Dream,
I cannot help but think,
standing upright as Masses
pass me by,
the only other potent image
me under Old Glory, eyes fixed
on its tattered body being whipped
unapologetically by gusts.
Still staring I cannot but wonder:
why is it so?

No, not the fact of the myth.
For me, that is all too clear,
remembering the body left
for dead on Wyoming fence,
haunting melody of Wainwright:
scarecrow, scarecrow,
stark lyrics mimicking stark
reality, no need to dress up erasure.

It seems so far in the past,
and yet so close,
fresh wounds of my own.
Just yesterday:
changed form, same message,
vitriol repackaged, as words--
laundry list of slurs
lacking cessation of breath,
but no less painful:

My own leaden tears sitting
in bed, nursing a perpetually
wounded soul, at twelve
bud already tempered by mighty frost,
new consciousness in
the wake of disconnect.

Reminded of its permanence,
I repeat the fact of myth.
Too well I know I cannot have
what others can have at a basic level,
written in law, laced in social expectation:

I am more than this, I tell myself.
Yes, I am and yet...
I am bound to this consciousness,
sexual partner inseparable from
treatment of the act.
Both blessing and curse
it cannot be undone,
unlike vision it
never loses clarity.

So why do I have to live this?
I pause for a moment, making sense
of jumbled thought as I am
greeted by something more solemn:
Why do so many endure this?
I plumb the depths of my mind
before the final question emerges
from the brambles:
why do so many miss Old Glory in tatters?

There are answers to these questions,
somewhere in this body of mine
they reside,
but looking up at skyscrapers
around Bryant Park,
they don't need to spoken.

The glory in the glint,
the wonder of the steel,
the job, the money,
promised through adorned facades:
renunciation of hope
never a thought
in light of the Dream of
quiet consciousness.

Even through deconstruction,
Dream spurious to me,
I am momentarily enraptured.
For just a second, still staring up,
wounded soul is mended,
Old Glory suddenly replaced
by giant LED version.

The sight forces me to
grab my stomach,
sudden sharp pain,
falling to the ground as my mind
seeks to slip out of consciousness
temporarily.

Even in the most potent
disavowals of the material,
the last thing I see before
waking up to an unfamiliar face
is glass and steel.
Unable to speak, heavy thoughts
are a deluge in my head:
we are doomed, we are doomed
by this glass and steel,

And all falls silent.

Without A Name

2009-02-22T17:38:00.005-06:00

Averse to labels
we plumb the unexpected
essence of this thing--
even without a name,
absent signifier,
we exist together in comfort

At night in sweet embrace,
draped in fabric and
lacking form from outside,
knowledge of our bodies our own,
we do nothing but smile;
lithe creatures lingering, in scene
most consider phantasm.

The Blend(s)

2009-02-05T20:35:00.002-06:00

Olive, oily skin,
calloused hands,
perfect flesh regardless of
unmistakable imperfections

I stare, longingly
I gaze at the body
Walking by, hot summer day,
Melted ice cream cones on sidewalk

Wondering when I can meet,
Lip lock contoured by carnal desire,
Sensory explosion in deep woods
While Mr. and Mrs. Smith
repeat tired heterosexuality
on Fifth Avenue.

Olive, oily skin,
Calloused hands,
For me banished
into some lonely corner,
forgotten by the Joneses,
names insignificant because of the blend,
reassertion of an already repetitious act.

I have it now,
Perfect flesh next to mine,
But we survive only in the Village,
Strolling by curiously blank statues
And black trans females
Teetering over us in three inch stilettos,
Our place, our relics, our realities
Marked by obvious erasure.

Lip lock contoured by carnal desire, we have
Our moment outside of the place
that christened a Movement.
But it does not last long.
Lingering on the present, wondering about the nights
We spent recently, abject moments alone,
Did we make any progress?
We question in thick humidity,
A ‘no’ the only certain answer
But we try to dream before

Spontaneous combustion—
we are not fit for this world—
stolen line from Amelie,
combustion of our possibilities

Replaced by haunts,
Image of his calloused hands
Dissolved into memory of
Stinging red marks from a
stepfather’s solid hand,
angry crusades against desire,
scripture re-interpreted with each slap.

Lachrymose twelve year old
Sitting on the bed nursing wounds next to
Undressed men, photos from somewhere,
Usually hidden in the secret box.
Wishing arousal would whither, away,
Out of his mind, into air, into water,
He flips the photos over, blank white
Against light blue sheets,
but nothing changes.
It never changes, he thinks,
Shame beginning to flow in, open window
On a warm spring night.

Replaced by spectres of my own,
The always-lingering heterosexual dream,
White picket fence in every frame, collapsed
on a wild lawn, mower sitting out rusted,
Discomfort intensifying as distant family asks about
Any opposites I have found away from home.
I say I am focused on my studies,
the only half truth I know that spares
me from the guilt of all-out lies

That morphs into fresh memory,
Only a month and a half old, of strolling
Down Decatur Street,
Cold winter day, blustery,
Wearing fingerless gloves and
Rainbow scarf, mark of a faggot
Of course, or I wouldn’t have been harassed.

Words, yes only words,
But random strangers,
Faces and bodies unknown to me
(no desire to turn around),
heckled me,
homo, homo, they repeated
as I continued forward, ever increasing pace,
turning a corner I wasn’t expecting,
concrete example of the queer path
bending to reproach, self and others
challenging notions of forward motion.

Reality once again,
Dreams, heap of fabric at the feet of
These experiences, new and old blended
Together, overwhelming desire for
Olive, oily skin of my companion stifled,
In the place where the closet exploded,
lip locked lovers pulled apart
For common purpose, pressing purpose:

We find the nearest bookshop,
Grabbing notebook and pen,
Sitting down, writing free flowing
Thoughts, unconcerned punctuation,
Just ideas suppressed in our erasure:
haunts we connected on—
our walk—
trans hookers wearing cheap stilettos to make buck
because of discrimination at work—
lonely nights wondering is this (motioning to lived life)
really worth it all?—
Another thought:
Where will I be in ten years from now?—
And yet another: Why do I fight?—

And so on, multiplication
With new connections formed,
Wondrous brain,
unexplained, mysterious neural pathways
that generate ideas freely,
coloured only by our own experiences
and imaginings

Quick steps down Decatur
drawn out now,
no hurry, no rush.
We write until the sun sets as
Little lamps light up and
Larger buildings glow magnificently,
A city unconcerned,
The Joneses unaware,
Repression of deconstruction
In a larger fabric,
Overly starched by discourses.

Thanks Foucault, I scribble on the page,
finally setting my pen down,
Tired mind only gazing at his calloused hands
Continuing the furious scribble I lost.
Three hundred ticks of the second hand
I gaze at the hands…
But they are not the same anymore,
Imagining red marks from past slaps,
Something more than flesh.

And from that realization
An idea ignites my tired mind.
I too am guilty of the blend.
Why did I not see it before?

With that question
He finally sets his pen down,
So? He asks simply.
So what? I reply, unsure of
What to let escape my mouth.
What do you want to do next?
The words come out so casually
I am taken aback.
Well…we…can…
Silence lingers for a long time
On the third ellipsis
Before a clear answer emerges.
How does not fucking sound?
Idea of perfect flesh lost in some other world.
Sounds good comes out—without hesitation
he goes on: I think I know what you mean.

As he grabs my hand, I feel the roughness as
We are interwoven, walking into the
Jungle night with only one expectation.

Wishing

2009-01-29T16:48:00.004-06:00

I throw a coin into the well,
Waiting a while to know
it has reached bottom.

Waiting for that sound I wish,
Fixation on the past—
Of lonely nights in bed
Deep red glass on the nightstand—
Fading to imagination.
Free me from this margin
I intone but suddenly find myself
Pausing…

Like creative bursts
From sitting by my willow,
Thoughts trickle into my head,
Without the usual reasonable limits.

A serpent wraps itself around me,
The uncomfortable tightness
in my chest intensifying:
Do I want to be freed from this margin?
I intone again
But there is only silence.

Hearing the distant plunk
I know what I have done.
I have wished to be freed
From this shadow zone.
Heavy in my mind is the realization:
I cannot take it back.

It escaped my lips and drifted off
Into Nature, into a power greater than
My own, a force more supreme and
Evocative than my simple humanity.

Where will I go if I am not in the margins?
I wonder staring up at the sky,
Indescribable blue, unblemished.
It is the place that I have always been,
From the nights as a child engrossed
In the fantasy world on page, unfurling
With talking mice, wizards and ghastly evil,
All seeped in man-made lore.

To those nights after bodily changes began,
cracking voice as body morphs,
carnal desire building, my newfound sexuality,
faggot, faggot I only heard.
I tried to hide it, pretend it was not me,
But what good did that bring me?

To those nights when the queer in me
Was comfortable, resting in my heart,
A point of shame no longer.
Ragdoll vanished, the image of me
sturdy in the wind,
Replaced instead by a disconnect,
Fine gossamer threads collapsed
With feeling like I did not fit in with anyone queer:
Intellectual building,
Postmodern deconstruction, leave nothing standing.
Perform gender…be nomadic,
voices of great wisdom told me.

The result: spectres of past experiences
Hissing acridly, no method of fumigation
When I knew only to question everything.
I found myself deconstructing me!

My body and mind scattered across some
vast landscape, ashes into the wind.
My mouth somewhere other than my head,
Only my ears listening to others,
always contemplating spoken words,
the poetry of it all and the harsh underbelly—
Lies, diminutive and brawny,
Lingering pointedly through harmonious facades.

So wrapped up in thought,
I am thrown back into the present world,
Realizing I am still hovering over the well.
If someone had passed by, I would have
Appeared to be suspended, standing up
Statuesque, in spirit of The Thinker.

Thus I wonder if it is at all possible for me
To ever break away from the margins.
After the proclamation and plunk—
Contract signed—
there has been no change,
Just endless suspension,
the pulling out of everything I tried to suppress,
Bringing a foggy world into a clearing
By shattering my own artifice.

Free me from this margin
I intone again.

But I quickly find myself laughing,
A noise that morphs into a blank expression,
And then again into a river down my cheek.
I cannot be freed and
I must not pretend.
It is who I am.

The Heart

2009-01-21T21:34:00.001-06:00

I thought you had a beating heart. I heard it those nights I slept next to you, your arm around me, and felt at ease. But now I wonder if it’s beating anymore. I wonder because you left me stranded in a place I need to leave. You left me stranded, with nobody else, nothing else save my own imagination, and now I have fallen from that comfortable place I once inhabited. I know this week has been rough for you. From the already fragile relationship with your father now completely crumbled, to the break up with boyfriend, times have been trying. But that does not mean I care for you any less or that I am not there for you any less. If anything, it only makes me want to help you more. It only makes me want to see you go on and find happiness and comfort more than ever. If there is anybody I know that deserves that comfort, it is you.

But now I am starting to wonder if you have a glass heart. I have helped you. Yes, you have helped me too, but now, in the moment when I need you most—in this midnight hour when I gasp for breath and heavy tears stroll down my cheeks—, I send you texts, I call you and am always met with the same response: none whatsoever. The icy silence consumes me. In mind, in body, in the air around me, that question “why” haunts me. Why…it lingers so stubbornly in every breath I take. Why…it lingers and makes me wonder if there is ever any resolution. There was a moment in the tears that anger surfaced, that I found a “fuck you” escape from my mouth. But the adolescent angst vanished in the wake of my realization. You’ve gone through your own tears, those violent paroxysms, the moment where you wondered why you had the parent(s) you do, and the loneliness that results from such a disconnect. You may not show it like I do. You put on a steely expression—impenetrable—and walk forward with an air of nonchalance. But I know you’re feeling something. We all feel something.

So I am asking you this: do you have a beating heart or is it made of glass? Do you care about me or do you not? Or, are things really this simple? Must one always have this veined understanding? Or lack it entirely, instead possessing no compassion whatsoever? Maybe it is that you do care, but with your own problems, you are afraid to show yourself as a strawberry in these rare winter frosts? Your nonchalance seems a means of shielding yourself, a protection from that which might destroy any comfortable feeling in your body. But I have tried this before; I have put on my best artifice and been something other than my essence (an idea loosely encompassing the spectres of my past). The result was this: constant moments of disconnect from action and feeling, a gripping psychological drama with my self as the only audience member. I may have done well by external standards, but walking on a long path forward with my true feelings as steam shooting out my ears was not a way to live. Admittedly, I have not freed myself from my past. I have not liberated my present feeling from my essence; spectres still linger on every corner as I take the streetcar down to Canal.

But I am making progress. You cannot expect these conversations with ghosts to be easy. Harsh words, hisses, untamed violence, neglect…they want to rip every good memory you might have ever had away from you. Yet you battle because you want to live. You battle because you want to exist beyond them, apart from them, as a wooden toy and not ragdoll. Whatever you might choose, know that I will be here for you. I have a strong, beating heart. You may have hurt me more powerfully than you have realised, but at the same time, I cannot blame you for everything that has happened. I cannot blame you for whatever ghosts you might have, for how powerfully the vehemence may have resurfaced this week. You are not your self only because of what you have done; your life is the ultimate theatre piece.

I look forward. I stare into a great unknown, away from the hisses and pain. I have dreams of the city. I have dreams of that PhD. I have dreams of that emotional freedom, of unassisted gliding through the invigorating air. Whether or not you choose to follow now is your choice. You will be on my mind because I look forward not just for myself. I look forward for anybody who has ever touched me and deserves that freedom too. To all the queer kids. To all the impoverished in inner city ghettos. To all the women wrapped up in thinking they need to be perfect. And also, perhaps most importantly, to those who have hurt us. I ask, taking in the fresh air, who was it that hurt you?

Tracking the Blog so Far

2009-01-19T18:20:00.000-06:00

Beginnings of an Essay for Pomona College

2009-01-17T16:50:00.000-06:00

I’ve always found myself in the margins, the place poet Mark Doty likes to call the “the edges no wants, no one’s watching.” When I was younger, it was a product of my shy, intellectual disposition; I was kid you’d find wrapped up in a 400 hundred-page book at ten years old. Through time these margins evolved a great deal, becoming a product of my burgeoning sexuality, as I realized I didn’t fit in within everyone else because of my desires. By the age of 16, I started coming out as gay to family and friends. From how I view individual actions and opinions differently, to the organizations and causes I have been most active in, my sexuality has been the lens through which I view the world. While such a lens has complicated my movement forward, as the spectres of a queer past linger with sunken eyes, it has also given me the desire to stand up, with pain and sadness floating coursing through my blood, and transform the inequities—whether based in race, gender, sexuality or class—that mark our society today.

Mindful

2009-01-11T01:10:00.004-06:00

He buckled his belt and looked into the mirror, making sure that his hair looked nice, his face was clean, and that there were otherwise no problems with his features. He went through this routine daily, of course, but something about this evening proved to be different. An unusual lightness could be felt in the air, as if a vacuum removed all impurities and weight. His heart was fluttering more rapidly for another guy than he had ever remembered. A romantic interest. The first in a while, definitely not the usual Mr. Right, but the sort of figure one finds so attractive because of imperfections and the intrigue that builds from them. As he looked into the mirror one final time, he saw the exterior he may have wanted to see—bright blue eyes, clear skin, the unmistakeable happiness—but internally, he realised the mess he was faced with. Everything about his exterior may have suggested a person confident and at ease, but a million questions exploded in his head like a whiz-bang fireworks display. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I am not what he looking for? Do I really look good physically or am I just delusional? And so on, as each question he tried to answer only created another one until he was sufficiently nervous.

As he walked out to his car, the internal confusion only continued, increasingly intense with each beat of his heart. If it were any other night, or any other person, he might have just walked back inside and curled up with the latest volume of one of his arts subscriptions, but something about tonight was different. Having had a long series of romantic failures, and the all too frequent nights alone sipping a glass of wine and reading a book, he wanted something new, the personal change that he had long talked about but never tried to enact. It wasn’t as if he had never wanted to change before; every single day he wished to be the better person he imagined so easily in his mind. If he had the means, he would have packed up his bags and moved to one of the cities of his dreams—San Francisco, Portland, Boston or New York City. But as a struggling graduate student in college making a meagre income from a 25 hour a week job, that was simply not possible. So he was trapped in the city he liked to call ‘a broken dream’, New Orleans, because it is where he found himself back in his undergraduate years, and it was the only place he knew to be outside of his home in the Midwest.

It was not that he didn’t try his damnedest to push for change around him. He was active as much as he could be, considering his schedule. And while he enjoyed the milieu of the city—the way in which the uneven sidewalks cast shadows in the moonlight or how the trees seemed more imposing than the buildings themselves—there were limits to his happiness. All around him, that strong sense of brokenness pervaded the air. High per-capita crime rates, people still in trailers from Katrina, the chocolate of the city ignored for the vanilla, bitter stinging anger still fresh on faces, and no real movement or purpose. He thought about how there were lots of promises. He paused and thought again yes, lots of promises but nothing real, no action, as if the engine of the action was old and ragged. With these discarded promises, there was a sense that opportunity was lacking for him in the city. While there may have been a vibrant arts scene that channelled every powerful emotion into something healing and transformative, there was nothing there for him. Not the type of lifestyle that he wanted to live. Not the type of art that he wanted to do. Only the uncompromising feeling of being trapped in a void—heartbroken, uneasy, and uncertain.

He chuckled at how naïve he had been when he first welcomed himself to the city and Tulane University. He never really wanted to go to the university itself, feeling it was overpriced and lacklustre, but he went for the city, for the lights, and instead came to find darkness. But it was that option or going back home, and too many haunts were there to find any comfort. With a startling abruptness, his phone rang. Looking down at the number, he saw it was the guy he was going to meet. His heart fluttering, he picked up the phone.

“Hey…I am doing well, thanks. How about you…Oh, okay…is it a problem? No, of course not. I need a few extra minutes to get ready myself…See you soon!” and he clicked the off button on his phone.

His date was running about fifteen minutes late, an idea that normally would have annoyed him, but was welcome in that moment. He had fifteen more minutes to process thoughts in his stormy mind; fifteen more minutes to try and quell any bit of nervousness and self-consciousness he may have felt; fifteen more minutes to abandon the thought that he could never find a guy that worked well for him. Instantly, he was thrown back to why he never seemed to move anywhere romantically. It was not without having making efforts, but he never seemed to move beyond failure. Since love was inexpensive, free even, his financial resources were not holding him back. Perhaps it was something else, he thought as he put the key in the ignition, perhaps it was something more powerful and difficult to escape. A single word entered his mind: fear. But what? What was he fearful of? He had a nimble intellect, the fiery eyes, a top-notch education. And yet he was still afraid. Of what? This time the question was more urgent; it demanded an answer and would not leave his head until it got one. Thank God for fifteen extra minutes! And he began to drive away.

The traffic, usually heavy at this hour, was the lightest he remembered seeing it in a while. While he could have easily gone down Claiborne Avenue, he always ended up choosing St. Charles, if for nothing else but to see the mansions. This evening they seemed particular fitting, illuminated by old-fashioned gas lamps and an emaciated moon casting a little light on the perfectly manicured lawns. What was he fearful of? He had tried to push the question out of his mind by focusing on the grandeur, but it was a stubborn houseguest that would not leave until any and all means of exposition had been exhausted.

New Shoes

2009-01-11T00:45:00.004-06:00

"Hey, I put some new shoes on, and suddenly everything was right!" - Paolo Nutini

Retrograde

2009-01-06T22:07:00.008-06:00

Living in the past...
Yes, I have my body in the present—
touchable, soft—
but my mind is elsewhere,
inhabiting a series of spectres,
my former selves.
I want, want, want nothing more
than mind to jump to the present,
To exist in the present,
NOW.
I want to walk jovially into the future.
The hard-to-reach corners of my dreams
bending toward me.
I grab them!
But only in my imagination,
not on the concrete sidewalks,
obscured by misty indecision.
I am retrograde
in my mind.
As if harsh lines of my jaw
fade to softer features......
assurance slips out from
under me,
romantic interests pop up
suddenly and
I shout out, I shout out
I WISH I COULD TAKE IT BACK.
Silence,
then the cicadas,
constant annoying buzz
on the hot summer nights.
I am alone, save them
and my mind begins to wander elsewhere,
down the knotted paths
to my home life,
troubles in the family,
disordered life, depression,
and then it all comes out,
everything of the past...
It just explodes and all around me are the pieces,
all around me are the pieces
but I want nothing more than to move forward,
to buck the retrograde,
witness the spectres dissolve,
hold the novel
I have always wanted to pen
in my soft hands, the rustle of the pages...
but I can't seem to figure out how to do that
and
nobody else has answers.
There seems nothing there to give me the kick.
Only more silence now,
the cicada hum lost to
memories of the past,
the body without the present mind,
the mind without the present body.
And I ask myself - why?

Spectacle(s)

2008-12-22T08:05:00.008-06:00

It seems odd to find spectacles in a graveyard. After all, what is it that the dead really can see? Or, as importantly, what would they want to see now that they are dead? Alas, nothing. But this all is part of the spectacle of body preservation. To embalm, bury and even entomb there are specific procedures, money, and a great deal of time required. There is, perhaps, no greater example of the spectacle than Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans where this photograph was taken. Here opulence is not hidden. Featuring above-ground monuments and mausoleums (in the style of Parisian cemeteries), some are indeed simple, but by and large you are in awe at towering stone structures and tombs that make you want to uncover the mysterious lives the enshrined once lived. While all of the spectacle seems useless coming from someone who does not believe in an afterlife, who sees death not as an ascent but instead a decomposition, it is nonetheless beautiful in part because it seems so futile. While I may see no spiritual value in the cemetery, rays of sunshine in the late afternoon dance over the stones and cast shadows I have never imagined before. The beauty lies in this absurdity.

As I pass by the spectacles on my way out, I know that they have no purpose, but it is precisely because they will sit there waiting, until taken or disrupted by weather, that they are illuminating. They are not for the dead. The dead cannot see any longer; their eyes have decomposed. They are but skeletons now, frames of their former glories and shortcomings. Instead, this human possession is there for the living, spectacles to preserve the spectacle of faith, reminding me of the lengths to which families go to provide a comfortable eternal life.

Sitting By My Willow: An Exploration

2008-12-21T23:24:00.004-06:00

I woke up this morning and didn’t think to myself ‘who am I?’ I woke up this morning and knew exactly who I was, what I was going to do, and what it meant to be me. I gazed half-mindedly into the mirror and didn’t gasp and think some stranger was staring back at me. Thinking about it now, I realize that if I didn’t know who I was, I would be lost in blustery wind— blown about without any sense of purpose, without any path, less traveled or not. ‘I am myself’ is such a strong statement, meaningful and uplifting all the same. But if I don’t know how to explain I am myself, can I really say I know who I am?

The first thing that I know is a part of me is my flesh, a byproduct of the X and the withered Y chromosomes. Together they are my genetic material, the sort of thing that makes me (at least) physically who I am. I look into the mirror and see those fire-and-ice blue eyes staring back at me, dirty blond hair sitting at the top of my head, my fair complexion dotted with some mild acne. But it isn’t just the fact that I recognize these features that is significant. I can recognize features on other people rather easily and it doesn’t bring me any closer to understanding who I am. They are not me; I am a separate physical being, at least as far I know. (Experimental physics anyone?)

It is the fact I have learned about science and genetics that I am able to apply those concepts to my own appearance, and am able to truly differentiate and say that I am myself. With my knowledge of genetics, I know it is virtually impossible to be physically identical to another person. I know looking into a mirror that the exact combination of color in and pattern in my eyes are not exactly the same. My unique pattern of fingerprint loops and arches and other traits belong to me and me alone. But (and there always seems to be an extra condition) that just can’t be the only reason I know I am myself because my physical appearance is only “skin-deep”. What about my brain, my mind, my past? What does that have to do with anything?

A great deal, I would say. At first, I’m quick to say that all of my experiences have shaped me in some way, but I realize that everyone has experiences everyday. After all, we are sensory-dependent creatures living in a world with too much sensory data to process at once. Thus I think it is necessary to look at specific experiences, their connections to one another, and ultimately the picture or image they seem to paint of my self. These experiences (and specifically the details of how they occur) are what set me apart from others and make me understand and comprehend just who I am.

Memories, I realize, are the very things that define my existence. They are my past— innumerable lockets tucked in my mind, just waiting to be drawn up. I lean against the willow, stare out on the reflective water, and I remember (without hesitation) my second birthday party. I was a precocious young child, awash with hot August sun, my light blonde hair shimmering in 1991. Denim overalls. A 1990s-style can of Pepsi clutched in my hands. A mischievous smile owning up to my precocity and limitless curiosity. It’s all vivid, fresh, and engaging, providing a sense of something that happened to me when I was a toddler.

I am tossed back into reality. But the water ebbs in the gentle breeze as my memories quickly pull me back a year to December 24th, 2005. It was Christmas Eve and I was just gotten out of a festive celebration at my great aunt’s house in Racine, Wisconsin. There had been satiating food and desserts, and a wonderful, warm feeling that just materializes with the holiday season. A good amount of snow had fallen while we had been inside, so the ground and the roads were slick and, consequently, rather dangerous.

I remember the car ride home pretty clearly as we were slipping and sliding all over the place on frequently traveled roads. But I also remember the trip because it was filled with tumult. I know I was arguing throughout the course of the ride with my mother. Exactly what I was arguing about, I can’t say I know for certain, but I think the fact that I don’t know what it was demonstrates that it isn’t very important. It might have been post-holiday blues, the “wild” nature of the ride, or a seemingly infinite number of other things. Whatever the tension was, it permeated the air and spilled out onto the snowy driveway as we pulled up to my house.

As soon as I got home, I went up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. I felt like an actor standing in the middle of the stage, six different colors of lights shining down, unable to remember my lines, making me feel confused and lost, swallowed up by my emotions and everything else I was feeling. The truth is I knew exactly why I had been getting into a number of arguments with my mother in the past few months; it wasn’t anything new or unusual. I had just come out as gay to friends beginning in October, but I had grudgingly held off from telling my mother for a number of reasons, mainly uncertainty of her reaction, the implications of my telling her, and a whole host of other emotions, even though I had a good idea she would be accepting and just fine with it.

A little bit later, as I felt my internal monologue brooding inside of me on the edge of my bed, she knocked on my door and asked to come in. I huffed out an okay, and she sat next to me on the edge of my bed, she had a look of concern on her face. I think I had an idea of what was coming. At once, she asked a loaded question that struck me squarely in the heart. “Is there something you need to tell me?” I sat quietly for a moment, in utter silence, and I looked at her for a moment. At that point, I felt the tears pooling in my eyes (though I still can’t explain why), and at once it all came out. Fast, a mess of words packed with emotion: “I’m gay.” Tears ran down her face, and we hugged in a tight embrace that didn’t seem to end for a long time. At that moment I knew she already had known, that there wasn’t anything wrong with being gay, and that she too felt relieved that I had mustered the courage to say those two words. And that was the end of my Christmas Eve.

The waves momentarily pound against the rocks and I am ushered back into reality. It’s this willow tree where I always go to gather up my thoughts and store them right in front of me. I sit quietly for a moment and realize something. Wait……I know something seems odd. I pause again, examining my memory, and spotting six bold words: though I still can’t explain why. At once, they’re jarring. I don’t want to hear them and they can’t be so. They can’t be something I said because I KNOW who I am and I know my emotions, how else would I able recollect with such detail the events of more than a year ago? Pausing again, I sigh and realize my conundrum. If I argue before that my memories and experiences, my second birthday and coming out (in particular), are what set me apart from others and create my sense of self, doesn’t it seem paradoxical not to know a part of a memory, especially at such an emotionally taxing moment?

It’s an interesting question but one that it certainly not the easiest to answer. If I answer that part of knowing myself is knowing what I am not, I don’t offer any proof. Certainly I can say I don’t know all of my emotions and can’t possibly ever understand them all because of the simple fact my brain has so many other things to process. You’d accept that notion unless you were in some ‘I spite science’ mood. But I don’t think I could give up on the underlying unknown meaning behind the tears. For me, I’d view it as a resignation, shying away from challenging my thought process. I am determined to understand it more.

First, I look at the tears as being situational, that is to say occurring in a specific moment based on a continuation of events beginning some hours before. The moment that my memory begins, I am able to start understanding and carefully analyzing exactly not just what is happening but what it, this situation, is trying to say about me. The first “real” moment of the memory— the period where things become clear— is the slipping and sliding on the frequently traveled roads. This act, written without much of my own conscious awareness, symbolizes the nature of the argument on the road, leading for the ride to be unexpected, and thus slippery, in an emotional sense.

It progresses on to the edge of my bed, where I profess feelings of emotional confusion and loss, suggesting the fact that I had so many other emotions to deal with already, I simply wasn’t able to deal with or comprehend all of them. But even this motion of confusion is interjected by what I see as truth, my saying that I really had been getting into my arguments because of coming out and hiding it from her. So was I really lost in my emotional realm or just creating at the time my own false sense of confusion? I think that at that time I created that false sense as a means of avoidance, a means to avoid the pronouncement of “I am gay.” I guess for me, taking a moment to think back, these arguments served as a neurotic defense mechanism to project my intense feelings of uncertainty with the possibility of abandonment into a form of an emotional anger release. Did it work? Clearly not, as anxiety only sprouted new leaves that were given an opportunity to mature longer each time.

This defense mechanism of projection in the car ultimately set me up for the pronouncement of gayness with my mother. Sitting on the bed, my mom came in, as I huffed out an okay (i.e. very grudgingly). She found a spot on the edge of the bed. She had a look of concern on her face so I had an idea of what was coming. She asked the loaded question and I sat silently for a moment, looked at her, and then cried. Just examining this for a moment, a number of questions arise. If I saw the look of concern in her eyes and knew what was going to be said why would I wait to cry until after she asked her loaded question? Why did I wait to cry until I was silent and looking at her? Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to start crying when she asked the question? Are emotions even rational? It’s a barrage of questions all at once, I realize, but they are absolutely necessary to understanding just how the tears came be. They are absolutely necessary to dispel the earlier question of a paradox being presented.

For the first question, a simple answer can be found. It is entirely possible that while I expected what was going to happen (natural intuition, perhaps). I wasn’t braced for the fallout of her actually asking a question and digging me into sharing such a big portion of who was. If this is the case, the idea of ‘knowing what to expect’ can merely be described in terms of knowing that I would have to come out but not being fully aware of specific details of the event— just how it was going to be expressed by my mother. Taking that notion into effect, I am able discount the idea that my tears weren’t actually based on coming out (something I have held pretty closely since that time) because I would have known I was going to come out and would have cried the moment my mother knocked on my door.

The answer to the second question, as to why I would have waited to cry until I was silent and looking at her, offers a plausible solution to why the tears themselves fell. It is possible that I waited to cry until I was silent and looking at her because I had time to process the look of concern on her face. In spending that time to process the look on her face and connecting it to my own preexisting feelings, I was able to realize that my actions of avoidance and confrontation against my mother caused negative impacts on her own physical and psychological well-being. She became increasingly concerned about me as we went through these spats and felt it necessary to confront me. It suggests the notion of me feeling sorry that my own selfish desire to remain (packaged) in the heterosexual realm of being directly hurt her. Thus, the tears served as a response of regret to my actions since October in remaining in the closet, fearful and uncertain just of what her reaction would be.

This idea certainly seems plausible, but is it what is considered truth? I mean exactly what truth is or how it is defined today is difficult to grasp. So I can’t say it is the truth— one hundred percent certain— just as much as I can’t say that all of the details in this memory are accurate (based on recent research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus ). However, something about this idea seems…no, is…visceral. It seems that way because of the nature of my feelings, of my emotions, and my personality complex. I have always been an emotionally virulent individual and, consequently, I respond strongly in most every emotional situation, particularly those involving my family. Thus, in this conception of myself, I would expect to respond rather emotively as I did. There isn’t any conscious control I have over (and had) over my tears.

Certainly I have control of my emotions but when it comes to feeling hurt, guilt, or regretful, I am relatively unable to hide the tears. As a child, when I used to scrape my knees or get a jammed finger playing basketball, I just wasn’t macho. I didn’t believe in that ideal of masculinity worshiped on roads, skyscrapers and football fields everywhere. Certainly that made me unique, different, queer or whatever other words exist, but that didn’t matter. Well, I mean it has influenced my friendships with other guys for nearly my entire life, but it also fit with my greater intellectual ability and maturity. Effectively, it was a part of who I was. But how can I quantify my emotions in looking at my mom as hurt, guilt, or regret?

I can quantify my emotion at that time as such by looking at patterns of my own behavior. For much of my recent life, there has been a guilt or regret complex that has taken hold in becoming increasingly self-aware. Through this process of self-awareness, I have concurrently developed a stronger emotional empathy and understanding for the needs of other individuals. In developing this empathy, I began to get more involved in the community and expose myself to more facets of culture and society (displays of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, poverty, punitive justice, etc.) that absolutely horrified me and caused me to reevaluate my position in society. Particularly, I think that I became more self-aware of the influence of my actions on other individuals such that I would feel a strong sense of guilt when I did something that wrongly and negatively influenced another person. This pattern seems to support the notion that my selfishness avoidance and hiding of my sexuality— and the fact that it caused negative effects for my mother— would contribute to feelings of regret in not going out sooner because of the guilt in hurting her.

With a stronger sense of why my tears fell in that moment, I wonder what the hell that has to do with who I am. I pause again. Waves splash and a gull swoops down, coasting across the surface of the water, searching for a hint of a late afternoon meal. The reasons why this is important become clear:

1) In rehashing and dissecting the memory, I arrived at a (new) point of understanding about myself.

2) In this point of understanding about myself, I developed an explanation for a previous unexplainable concept or idea in such a crucial point in my life.

3) Through the analysis of a moment I didn’t understand, I used preexisting fabrics of myself to fit my behavior into a larger pattern or personality complex, thereby strengthening and supporting this personality complex.

4) It devalues the idea of the “knowing is part of knowing what I don’t know” because it demonstrates, in this instance, not knowing something about yourself is really just an expression of not putting forth enough effort to understand what you don’t know. It can also be an expression of the need for a reevaluation of the methods you have previously used to try and understand something.

5) Finally, the process which you use to arrive at understanding something unknown relies blatantly on past memories, present feelings, and conceptions of the world— all what I describe as important aspects of self.

Ultimately, who I am is part physical self but mostly an expression of personality, emotion, memory, and mind— the stored, unseen, and expressed aspects of what constitute our interactions and perceptions of the world. As the sun begins to dip beneath the clouds, I pack up the rest of my things, setting all but my notebook out of sight. In a lingering image in the pink hued sky, the tears of my past fall again— now understood. It seems that by taking my existing framework and using it to realize parts of myself difficult to figure out, I am to further support that framework to make it seem more genuine. That examination of specific unknown aspects of self through the broader known aspects of self seems to be effective in providing a richer answer to that burning question of “who am I?” Another wave crashes against the shore, striking the rock gently, capturing— with great accuracy— my present state of mind. Peaceful, calm and serene, all I wonder in this moment is “who are you?”

Clueless!

2008-12-19T02:12:00.007-06:00

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/cao_tries_to_crack_black_caucu.html

Just go and read some of the comments on this link. They're far too short sighted and misinformed. Apparently racism has vanished and Black people are really racist toward white people. However, in my own experience, I just recently I had a conversation with a white man who identified as a DEMOCRAT who used the n-word during this conversation. Old attitudes and beliefs do not die so quickly. It seems vitriol is masked in public but escapes in close, private company. It makes me wonder how many other people, even those who identity as Democrats, share similar views.

Very much related is the article about race and Hurricane Katrina on The Nation website. I have really been more incensed and saddened in reading an article before. Apparently in the Algiers, which is a neighborhood located just across the river from New Orleans, Black individuals were trying to escape the floodwaters. However, once in Algiers they were shot and harassed by local white individuals. In one of the interviews conducted, these people are referred to as 'it'. This 'it' is significant because it emphasizes a dehumanization of persons based on race. These Black individuals become sport animals; like deer or elk, the one who shoots the most receives the most praise.

It is so deeply unsettling to hear both those who identify as Democrats and those who are but a half hour away express such racist and hateful ideology. Any consciousness of white privilege or racial inequities, undeniable anywhere you look in New Orleans, is non-existent. I wonder what other people think about this and if there is any hope for a more just New Orleans and surrounding areas based on race.

Past

2008-12-19T01:45:00.001-06:00

Sunsets

2008-12-18T23:31:00.007-06:00

Something about sunsets always gets me,
but what exactly it is seems obscured,
as if it was shrouded by a dense fog.

Perhaps it is the fact that every colour is never the same.
One day you have vivid pinks,
the next you have bold oranges and reds.
Or in the case of the other night,
a deeply unsettling purple coloured smoke from factories.

Perhaps it is because they represent a certain finality,
the end of a day,
the passing of time.
Whereas sunrises are invigorating,
sunsets bring about a rumination.
You think not of what you will do,
but what you have done.
It's as if you are untying the knot you made for yourself in the day,
working backward to deconstruct what has gotten jumbled.

Or perhaps it is that sunsets are just so wondrous
because they are always unexpected,
mirroring the life with leave with a certain
aesthetic beauty our own experiences almost certainly do not have.
Part of the beauty is the colour, but equally as important
is the arrangement of these colours, the whole image,
the canvas.

Whatever the case may be,
I have witnessed two of the most beautiful sunsets
in quite some time,
leaving me deep in thought and looking
forward to the end of another day.

On the Holidays

2008-12-18T16:02:00.002-06:00

I am not coming home to Wisconsin for the holidays. Anybody who I tell this to seems shocked or confused.

Why on Earth would I not want to come home for Christmas?
Am I shielded some dark and deep secret?
Am I secret repressing my hatred of my family?

No, I am not. My family, like any other, has its fair share of problems. But they are not really the reason for my absence in Kenosha this holiday season. Instead, I intend to stay away because I spent the better part of three months this past summer with disappointed results, to say the least. I don't feel the need to repeat a particular unhappy that I have tried to get away from in going to another state to study for school. At least here in New Orleans I'll be able to get out rather easily and see the great line-up of movies coming to Canal Place Cinema. Since I don't drive and don't have a car, I'd basically be trapped inside for the better part of a month. I can't deal with that.

But I am also staying for one other very important reason: the weather! I mean, I have been living in New Orleans since August. Yes, it did snow once last week for a couple of hours. But with temperatures in the 70s today, it it is something like 55 degrees warmer than in Kenosha. I'll take that any day. I was just out walking the other day in flip-flops and still saw plenty of green, with butterflies around me. That sight is something you cannot beat in the middle of December.

But enough of this talk, I am off to read Marquis de Sade on a friend's recommendation. I am not really looking forward to it, I will admit. But at least there isn't a snowstorm coming.

A Grim Beginning

2008-12-17T23:59:00.000-06:00

I always find myself searching for a bit of peace and quiet. Yet I always end up like the soda can in this picture, trapped beneath a layer of ice, aware of my situation but unable to break through. I know exactly what I want but am completely powerless to change it. I try with everything I have. Every bit of spirit pours out, fueled by any dream ever conceived in my oversized head. From the obnoxious desire in fourth grade to be a weatherman to the desire now to see political artifice be obscured by genuine change, I push forward, unrelenting. But then comes that terrible moment. The sun vanishes. The flowers seem to lilt. The air stiffens and becomes heavy. Every bit of spirit is useless. That is the situation now. A grim beginning. A critical juncture that could mark a relatively consistent set of behaviours and goals or a dramatic upheavel that could set me down a path that I do not want to take. Thus I think most deeply and carefully, hoping for a way out of the listless air and unassuming malaise. What I feel most dear about depends on it.