43 Lgbtq poems

Two guys sucking each other in the steam room didn’t want anything to do with me, evidently— I left them to their comedy. * Legato longings: wish for walnuts, wish for water, wish to exorcise this morning’s debauch— two Fauré nocturnes. * In slow motion Steve tussled with a motorcycle trying to run me over on the boulevard of moon smut splicing together bridges and lagoons, like the bride of Frankenstein rushing to overtake the inert Real, a mass of facts, some conjugal, some comic— contrapuntal tenebrae!

I can enter the morning with traces of an eternal dream: to live on a planet of women. we sing in the fertile forest, caress on lavender hills, bathe beneath cascades of clear waters. and just like that, nude and wet, we mount each other’s bodies. our desire is a whale that searches for calm in the depth of the sea. I smell sex in my hair when I awaken. the dream perfumes all of my days. I go to the post office and look for stamps with etchings of flowers and fruits so that I can send letters to the women who loved me in my sleep. we are in a world that is not ours. what do we do with the dreams that touch our consciousness in the nude each night? our planet of women is nothing more than a dream. who knows how many of us bathe in the woods or which ones of us have wings that let us fly with our flesh? it’s not for anyone to know. fortunately, we always dream paradise, we make it ours. there, we find each other and live in our collective memory. and so, I smell sex in my hair when I awaken.

shepherdboy?   not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available.   unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain : a reference already escaping.   I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd rather: a caveman, came spelunking into that grotto I’d retreated to what light he bore illumined such small space—physically, temporally and did he have a grove of beech trees? no, no grove but together we found an old-growth stand of   redwood we gouged each other’s chests instead of wood:   pledges that faded he was not cruel nor I unwitting.   but what endures beyond any thicket? example: he took me to the ocean to say farewell.   I mean me: farewell to ocean the ocean, for that matter, to me.   us both fatigued, showing signs of wreckage and that man I had loved stood back from the edge of things he did not hold me I expected not to be held we all understood one another: shepherd understudy, ocean, me and did he go back to his fields and caves? yes, but they were gone strip-mining, lumber, defoliant, sterile streams: you knew that was coming weren’t we taught some starched sermon: the pasture awaits us elsewhere back up a moment: the forest you mentioned—remember, instead of a grove? untouched for the most part.   some human damage, but not ours we left no mark, not there in the midst of those great trees: not in the concentric rings that might have held us far past living instead, I put that man, like so many others, on paper— a tree already gone from sight where once it had drawn the eyes upward: the crest of a mountain.   crumpled thoughts, crumpled love shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of   the coastal fig? I put them on paper, too, so fragile.   for nothing is ever going to last For Haines Eason

Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live with one hand tied behind his back? So he began to fall into the star-faced section of night between the trestle and the water because he could not meet a little town’s demands, and his earrings shone and his wrists were as limp as they were. I imagine he took the insults in and made of them a place to live; we learn to use the names because they are there, familiar furniture:faggot was the bed he slept in, hard and white, but simple somehow, queer something sharp but finally useful, a tool, all the jokes a chair, stiff-backed to keep the spine straight, a table, a lamp. And because he’s fallen for twenty-three years, despite whatever awkwardness his flailing arms and legs assume he is beautiful and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. Or else he is not afraid, and in this way climbs back up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys who hurled him from the edge— really boys now, afraid, their fathers’ cars shivering behind them, headlights on—and tells them it’s all right, that he knows they didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t swim, and blesses his killers in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive.

In america, I place my ring on your cock where it belongs. No horsemen bearing terror, no soldiers of doom will swoop in and sweep us apart. They’re too busy looting the land to watch us. They don’t know we need each other critically. They expect us to call in sick, watch television all night, die by our own hands. They don’t know we are becoming powerful. Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming. What the rose whispers before blooming I vow to you. I give you my heart, a safe house. I give you promises other than milk, honey, liberty. I assume you will always be a free man with a dream. In america, place your ring on my cock where it belongs. Long may we live to free this dream.

I Androgyne, mon amour, brochette de coeur was plat du jour, (heart lifted on a metal skewer, encore saignante et palpitante) where I dined au solitaire, table intime, one rose vase, lighted dimly, wildly gay, as, punctually, across the bay mist advanced its pompe funèbre, its coolly silvered drift of gray, nightly requiem performed for mourners who have slipped away... Well, that's it, the evening scene, mon amour, Androgyne. Noontime youths, thighs and groins tight-jean-displayed, loiter onto Union Square, junkies flower-scattered there, lost in dream, torso-bare, young as you, old as I, voicing soundlessly a cry, oh, yes, among them revolution bites its tongue beneath its fiery waiting stare, indifferent to siren's wail, ravishment endured in jail. Bicentennial salute? Youth made flesh of crouching brute. (Dichotomy can I deny of pity in a lustful eye?) II Androgyne, mon amour, shadows of you name a price exorbitant for short lease. What would you suggest I do, wryly smile and turn away, fox-teeth gnawing chest-bones through? Even less would that be true than, carnally, I was to you many, many lives ago, requiems of fallen snow. And, frankly, well, they'd laugh at me, thick of belly, thin of shank, spectacle of long neglect, tragedian of public mirth. (Chekhov's Mashas all wore black for a reason I suspect: Pertinence? None at all— yet something made me think of that.) "Life!" the gob exclaimed to Crane, "Oh, life's a geyser!" Oui, d'accord— from the rectum of the earth. Bitter, that. Never mind. Time's only challenger is time. III Androgyne, mon amour, cold withdrawal is no cure for addiction grown so deep. Now, finally, at cock's crow, released in custody of sleep, dark annealment, time-worn stones far descending, no light there, no sound there, entering depths of thinning breath, farther down more ancient stones, halting not, drawn on until Ever treacherous, ever fair, at a table small and square, not first light but last light shows (meaning of the single rose where I dined au solitaire sous l'ombre d'une jeunesse perdue?) A ghostly little customs-clerk ("Vos documents, Mesdames, Messieurs?") whose somehow tender mockery contrives to make admittance here at this mineral frontier a definition of the pure... Androgyne, mon amour. San Francisco, 1976

Looking at Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids, I learn that he liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women, both shaved and un’—all giving a good whiff to the camera. But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman voices reveling in the background. But even when silent, the dingy phone is a sex organ—cock asleep in its cradle.

pride month is parades and rainbow logos and companies that don't care eleven months of the year real pride is the other eleven months showing up anyway being visible on a tuesday when nobody is watching

Found family is a thing when your actual family doesn't quite fit i found mine in the bar on 7th in a group chat at a pride picnic they're mine as much as anyone is

I'm out and i'm fine the two things that seemed impossible at once out and fine like a weather report for a life i didn't think i'd have