Song. Dill fills the air with longing
What was the Twentieth Century
Appetite. I grew up wondering would I
Ever fuck like them, the dead. They left
Behind the lingering sense of an ethos:
To discover love, if you could, in your
Own way for your own self, outside the dread
And shame they’d installed all around you.
Is the asshole closer to death, is shit close to it
And why when some pray do we put our ass
In the air to kiss the ground, the rosebud
Of the dark side of our minds waving in the blue
Sex and death got married and had a baby.
I wasn’t there when it happened and nobody exactly
Told me about it. There was a lingering scent on the air
My first years in New York going to the one no two really
Good nightclubs, when the Meatpacking District
Was still full of actual meat and blood and tall whores
In beautiful crowds picking carefully over the cobblestones
In their enormous heels and wigs. Here ends the only
Nostalgia I shall permit myself. I was feeling kind
Of Auschwitzy in a vegan restaurant in Warsaw.
There was an H&M and a multiplex across the street
From the ghetto wall nestled inside an apartment
Complex. I’m alive only because the false identity
My grandmother’s husband bought her before he was killed
Meant she had a job just outside that wall. The malls
Are built all over the world that we might shop our way out
Of oblivion. It was easy to weep at the wall. I put
My forehead on it and said my dead uncles’ names and Tadeusz
Richter the name of the man my grandmother actually loved.
A plague. A genocide. The usage of the world. Lathe
Of all difference. I used to have a nightmare that recurred:
A spiral of water draining down a hundred thousand family
Pictures. None of them people I knew, all of them faces
I could love if I had the chance. The idea of loving as a public
Act is something I inherited. The felicity of men who fuck
Like friends is the thing I admire. The Emma
Goldman brilliancy and courage of the women
Of Act Up is my living moral referent. But I
Don’t know how to write a poem about AIDS.
I don’t know anybody who died of it. I read Tim
Dlugos to face Warsaw because of a line about his
Father or grandfather speaking Polish. Can everything
Be made to resolve into my originary pain? What drove
My mother insane. And an idea of liberty and elegance
Perfected by gay men in cities: the constellation of my youngest
Desires. I’m on a banquette in Winslow Arizona next to my
Post-gender lover, my person. I used to talk a lot about the Gay
Priesthood, about queerness as a Kohanim, priest
Class of the world, with whom you get high, tend to the sick
And imprisoned, advocate for the misunderstood, and die
In grace. Where would we be without nightclubs, the liberation
Of sex from “love” as defined by hetrosexist patriarchy, the lesbians
Who teach poetry in prisons, the women who radiate zero
Sexuality in order, like running fleeing nymphs to flee the frankly
Real male gaze, where would we be? Where would we be without
Chelsea Manning’s agony? The Dans Macabre of plaguetime Paris?
The New York I never knew?