The HyperTexts
John Marcus Powell
John Marcus Powell is a poet/performer. As an actor he has appeared in London’s
West End, in many Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway plays, as well as in films
and television. As a writer, his poetry and fiction have been published widely.
He is Welsh, but feels most at home in New York City. His chapbook
Loony Lovers
and full-length poetry collection
Glorious Babe are available from Exot Books
and, like a lot of his poetry, they are concerned with the sensation of being Queer in
a queer world.
Here are Tom Merrill's comments about John Marcus Powell's latest book,
Glorious Babe:
Predominantly comprised of autobiographic anecdotes delivered in deadpan, this
is a propulsive collection that makes no demands on a reader's patience. There
is not a boring word in the book.
Urbane, witty, idiosyncratic, and enviably candid, its author is hosting a
whimsical tour of life's margins, its commonly bypassed byways, complete
with all the offbeat characters, and all the wealth of exotic opportunity, that
goes with that territory.
The work of an accomplished humorist, it pays no heed at all to conventional
poetic craft, except for an occasional echoey reminder of the art-for-art's-sake
school. A couplet of sorts will suddenly emerge in the midst of an otherwise
plain-spoken recounting, breaking the flow and startling a bit, and causing one
to wonder, whence cameth that? But overall, story is everything to this author,
telling his tales in his own inimitable way, and there is never any guessing
about what he means, except when he puts together an amusing concatenation of
irreducible words to express what perhaps is best transmitted by suggestion.
The book does not satiate. A sequel would be welcome.
Showroom
‘Sexual decorum’ writ by laws floating above / around the page
is at odds with technology
(they fight powerfully / gently).
The conundrum is—when prohibited desire is manifested digitally
the romantic heart is titillated.
Titillation is Essential / Central.
Central is opposite to Superficial.
Superficial is tassels on a fringe.
Latterly the media has bemoaned the peril posed by the website Backpage.com.
Consumers searching for a virginal apartment / a Christian towel rack
an ethical selection of jellies / jams
come across hustlers (escorts) / hookers (strippers)
who’ve established this new home / base after being banished from other affronted parts.
The media, determined to prove its affiliation with innocence, has forged a premise—
“ONCE DESIRE IS ERASED IN ONE AREA IT TURNS UP IN ANOTHER.”
As this wasn’t known before they sat down at the computer,
before their grandparents put biros to paper.
As soon as one animal conceived another in the Great Raw Naked
this has been the fashion of the world’s turn.
On my computer, photos of hustlers (heroic) / hookers (bodacious) are on the right.
I am sitting at a desk, making a selection, changing opinions.
The photos would be stage left if I belonged to the digital world inside the screen.
Across from the photos, age measurements price height
are listed (along with promises of large surprises).
These lists have the geometry of poems.
Poems stimulate with large small truths / small big lies.
I flick through ads selling intelligent abdominals, masculine projectiles, mammalian wiles
and settle on
“150 DOLLARS WILL PERMIT YOU TO PLAY WITH MY LONG BLACK SNAKE.”
I dial the number and am confronted with a gruff bass voice.
“Black snake! What are you talking about? I’m selling furniture.
Can I interest you in some Queen Anne? Come on! I’ve not sold a piece for weeks!”
As an antique dealer his voice resonates with inevitable aging.
I accept an invitation to examine what he’s got—before it fades away.
What he shows me is desirable (“Behold,” he instructs. “Do you like what you see?”)
rare (illuminated in the moment)
and in such conditioning we steer beyond the outer spectacle
to touch deep notions of display.
Then and there we loiter through his showroom, developing a connection
founded on each other’s love of craftsmanship,
on one another’s interpretation of decay.
My Abode
Let’s face it we have to be careful about whom we take back home.
After an initial conversation the person to whom I am attracted
turns out to be educated—history philosophy comparative religion.
At the same time I have suspicions,
there is an ingrained understanding of the murderous impulse,
strategies for hostage taking, rituals involved in houses of ill repute.
The café where we’ve met has green surfaces, giving the aspect of a room for competitions.
(Who is competing with — who is competing against — who is competing for — whom?)
When I get up he automatically follows.
Walking together we get an inkling of how one and the other of us endure.
He is looking for a Daddy. He has a military background. I learned to shoot at school.
His long hair springing from an electric nest is perfect energy.
(Conversely it conjures a longing for hair so short it barely covers up the bone.)
In the tattoo on his forearm are Roots Deracinated
twining an Earth which can’t calm down.
(Conversely how long till this design impacts like purest corn.)
His sprite elegance implies an erotic intelligence capable of turbulent
inventions.
(Conversely. Oh God! Exhaustion practiced till the naked dawn.)
I could say, “Sorry . . . I’m too old anyway.”
But there’s boredom about honesty, flat disappointment about dishonesty.
(I’m being attacked by the whole damn throng.)
What I’m ashamed of is that the subversive streak I am so proud of
longs, minute by minute, to conform.
I lie, in a voice which contains the essence of me, that I share my apartment
with a Freak who’s straight.
I am obliged to go ahead, to plead the case.
Will he wait? He smiles the promise of the Goat God Pan.
As a man of honor I add, “I won’t be long.”
and cross the road to enter a pretentious building with a side exit.
From there I beat it to my apartment, empty, 10 blocks distant,
up in the elevator. I reach the seclusion of my bleeding fortress.
Like the Lady of Shallot
if circumstances fit my agenda, I might come down.
Tenant Patrol
I live on the ninth floor of a New York City Project
and my guests are vetted. In the lobby they sign a leather-bound red book.
This signature is the stamp of their Persona
alongside the record of who they stayed with, visit’s duration,
whether it occurred by night or day. If a guest enters
or exits between 9pm to 5am a security man is on duty
and there’s no confrontation. This security man views morality
as intangible. No mind altering answers to unanswerable uestions.
No integration of rules when unrecognizable games are played.
Daylight hours are another story. From 7am to early evening
A ‘Tenant Patrol’ consisting of a dozen or so ordinary tenants,
(we’re talking Chinese Bullies, Mafia Papis, Wannabe-Rabbis,
New England Mother Superiors) whose credential is
they live in the building, sit in the lobby, checking who likes what in what positions.
A visit is a psychosis which buckles the duct of the normal, tears a vent.
Knowledge is ascertained by attitudes visitors are not able to get into—
how the spidery genital on the stairwell casts its shadow as they sign their name
My guests are varied and when we come together hopefully
it’s shocking. Where there’s shock there’s breath. But oftentimes
we discuss food (in a stew do you use canned broth?)
the latest movie, how it curls around its breadth.Whoever the visitor,
Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Phillip Roth, Hustling Porn Star,
Keats (we are discussing my social life in the reality of dreams),
whoever comes round after breakfast in a ninth floor one bedroom
of a twenty story building of a New York City Housing project—
both I and the guest are huddled in the trenches strategizing
the meeting with the looming patrol, how we’ll muster our defense.
I wish I had the courage of the hooker staying with this guy
who disclaims her, up on the fourteenth or maybe the tenth. She stays with this guy
and she says she’s his daughter. She isn’t his daughter. She’s a hooker—
part truck driver, part Medusa, Queen Mab who queens the night.
When she comes in with a client the tenant patrol screams,
“You don’t live here. You don’t have rights.” And she brandishes the finger
and encouraging her client, passes without signing. No feigned humility
disguises the supremacy of her entrance into the elevator (her flower garden)
where one plus one equals forty two when you appreciate the scent.
Who Is Your Favorite Royal?
“Who is your favorite Royal?”
This question implies obeisance is a privilege.
Difficult to stomach unless
one is beguiled by the astonishing lack of sweat in aristocratic underclothes.
Personally, I do have an answer. I’ve had contact with a Royal at close quarters.
I served Prince Charles while I was working in Harrods
where, what’s not to be forgotten can be bought in bottles
and the obtaining of needless possessions prevails.
I was working in the chemist’s department over Christmas. Our wages were audacious.
Payday was a fingering of our anus
so we stole to have enough to pay the rent.
If the transaction was in cash and they handed over the exact amount
instead of going to the cash register we slipped the money into our loose pockets
and on its requisitioning were on a par, in terms of wealth—its dubious acquisitioning—
with Lords, Ladies, Barons, Baroness.
Constant customers: never more than a selection of appetites,
a bundle of foibles, slithers of the ordinary, masquerading as mahogany.
Unless one believes title says more, and that class is the final fact.
So frequent were the visits of the titled that when Charles came incognito
we were all aware of the presence of a Prince
whose birth into the broad world had to be accepted
like bacon which, whatever your opinion, continues to exist.
An elderly equerry approaches. I am the oracle at the counter.
“Is this the department for hot water bottles?”
Charles, obviously anonymous among the pharmacy shelves,
tended by his secret service (detectives full of non-sexual energy)
(non-sexual ‘Lords in Waiting’) (and who the hell non-sexual else?)
moves forward to hear my answer to this missal from the court.
“We have the usual rubber models in all colors, a model in the shape of a tortoise,
expensive models in stone.”
“We’re giving hot water bottles for Xmas. We’d like the regular model. Say—fifty.”
On the sudden, a flurried conference.
The group around the Prince forms a scrum out of which the Prince’s voice expounds,
“Make it sixty. Hell to pay if anyone’s left out.”
“Sixty then. Send them to the Palace. Put it on the account.”
(Important customers have a Harrod’s ‘account’.)
I ask, “What Palace?” “Buckingham,” is his answer.
He has no idea he’s prancing on the frieze of a Royal Stuccoed Joke.
In cold damp climates a container (usually rubber) is filled with hot water (a hot water ‘bottle’)
and taken into bed.
This object is proletarian and helps with the circulatory system of the poorer classes.
Feet are meant to be placed upon it, though it can be placed on all bodily areas,
inducing ecstasies in individuals who have quite satisfactory heating systems in their homes.
In a capitalist system jokes are unacceptable though humor is all about.
Throughout Harrods I become famous as the sales clerk
who has sold Prince Charles sixty hot water bottles.
A Japanese shoplifter stops by to strike up a friendship.
As he flirts he eyes the locked cabinet containing high-priced perfumes.
When dealing with an abusive system, retaliation is in order.
De rigueur. A la mode.
Here comes Management. I am being considered for promotion.
This fate gurgitates a phantom of myself
mingling as a cocktail with the overwrought establishment.
My achievement will be to tear at the roots of its grammar,
squelch the tubors of its prejudiced vocabulary
and instead of joining in the aristocratic oratory
let out a screech at its wincing verbs.
Thin Skinned
And on the seventh day after his sixth chemo Parker is so weak
he has no choice in the matter. All he can do is rest. Chemotherapy
is accumulative. So of course is space. Is the journey towards annihilation
a journey to our zenith? Back at his third chemo Parker began to live
in this place where nobody prays.
Today he has to go to the cancer centre for the result of the X-ray
to discover if the lumps have formed into clumps or have been forced
to disappear. I insist on going with him. He mumbles, —the doctors
will think I’m his white boy friend, that he’s a Black Queer Bi-sexual,
an Ethnic who pays visits to White Homoland. —Well! The road of truth
doesn’t have to connect with facts. Facts are lanes which run in all directions.
Parker doesn’t enter into this conversation.
He has no breath.
Suffering is a gerund, a
transference of the active (he suffers)
into its substantial. Pain can be transferred from the substantial
into its descriptive, e.g. ‘I’ve got a pain’ into ‘It’s painful’—also
into the active ‘It pains me’. Between Pain and
Suffering, I choose Suffering.
—No. Let me change to Pain. —No, I’ve changed again.
Between pain and suffering, I choose change.
Before he knows it, we
are getting out of the cab (he’s too weak
for public transport) outside the Cancer Centre in Union Square.
In Union Square there are too many people for this overcrowded century,
across in the park astounded autumn trees
have too many leaves.
In the reception area
there is a frail female patient and a fat male patient.
Both of them possess an indestructibility that is only temporary, but which
on this Friday morning at 10:49 at the end of October
is
on display.
Nature Of Questions
Questions proliferate. I’ll go as a priori as I can make it—
“Do I have to leave?”
“Is the exterior nothing more than Tryst after Tryst?”
These were my concerns as I lounged inside Mam’s belly.
Also— “If this womb is inside my Mammy, what is my Mammy inside?”
Later, on my way to a plutocratic meeting, as I walk—questions are expected.
I ask the bright noon sky,
“Why don’t clouds descend to halo me, stole me, shroud me?”
Down below, my tootsies ask the sidewalk,
“What is the British equivalent for sidewalk?
Path? Walkway? Paved Ground?”
In an office on Christopher Street I supply answers to a technocrat.
We are hidden behind his plastic carbon screen.
This is an annual meeting, and this financial-aid officer negotiates the paper
work necessary
for me to renew my participation in Medicaid.
Medicaid is medical insurance for those with multiple medical conditions and
no income—paid by the country, the state.
To renew Medicaid it is preferable to respond to the Inquisitor in a tortured
fashion.
RENT!
“Why don’t I own?” “Am I a commie?”
MARRIAGE!
“Do I view it as inconvenient to be someone else’s property?”
“Was I divorced because I couldn’t get it up?”
“Didn’t I sometimes get it up?”
“Could I not get it up because of confrontation with the same old same?”
“In marriage between all kinds of genders isn’t this a constant?”
“Is constant synonymous with always always to remain?”
The financial-aid officer, judging by his hairstyle, must be heterosexual—
the dark clump, stuck to his skull, is pleased raw pain.
GREEN CARD!
“Am I a non-citizen because patriotism is akin to fascism?”
“Is the Pope the
Generalissimo?”
AND HERE’S A TOPIC! “What’s my faith?”
THEN THE GOB STOPPER WHEREIN THE QUESTIONER IS INTERROGATOR SUPREME!
“What have I done to deserve another period of survival?”
“Period of survival!”
“Survival period!”
You say, “Tomarto.”
I say, “Tomayto.”
You say, “AIDS.”
I say, “HIV.”
Things are quiet in his office.
“If I don’t get on the program what’ll happen?”
The price of medication is high on the mountain,
the shack at the bottom is my total means.
By the way—if I ask, “What is uncertainty?”—“Is that postulation or question?”
Depending on inflection ‘postulation’ fades into ‘question’. But the
difference is not erased.
Always this agony between ‘almost different’ and ‘nearly the same’.
With the meeting over
I saunter a corridor
descend the stair
to a toted anonymity.
“If I proceed with anonymity...?”
Damn! Another question!
“If I proceed in anonymity
die in anonymity
will the beat just beat?”
Origins
In the late fifties I studied drama at Cardiff College of Music and Drama
which in those days was housed in Cardiff Castle,
in a Victorian Gothic Mansion, part of a mish-mash of castle architecture
built on 20 or so acres in the middle of a city surrounded by sturdy rampart
walls.
In the Autumn of 1958 a female acting student
(later to become famous—so her name will not be disclosed)
had hysterics up on the ramparts.
A fellow student went over to see what was happening and returned to me
sitting in front of the Victorian Gothic Mansion (the college) on the
ill-cared-for grass.
The reason for her disturbed state was that she’d discovered I was Homosexual.
This
would preclude me from becoming her boyfriend.
I’d had no idea she wanted me to be her boy friend.
We moved away from the Victorian Gothic Mansion to sit near a noted
architectural feature,
the Norman Keep in the centre of the grounds.
Nor had I yet decided to be homosexual.
All of the Castle, the Keep, the Victorian Gothic Mansion, a Magnificent Clock
Tower at the corner was built on the site of a Roman Fort.
The first I time I heard of AIDS (its first name was ‘The Gay Cancer’)
I was waiting to have my hair cut at an expensive hairdresser’s. This
hairdresser
incorporated the flowing locks of the sixties—with its suggestion we weren’t in
command—
with a chiseled directness, coming from way in the future,
making one believe that when all was said and done the owner of the hairstyle
understood what was.
The hairdresser was discussing ‘The Gay Cancer” with a client, a successful
musician,
and passed me a brochure showing the disease killing guys in San Fran and New
York.
I was looking for work in New York City
and I had a friend Mike (who died of AIDS a short time later) whose boy friend
was this hairdresser who on the phone offered me a free haircut when we’d
introduced ourselves.
The hairdresser was an Anglophile who presumed everybody from the United Kingdom
was ethically wise.
On the few times I met him I didn’t correct him. The United Kingdom
(myself included)
had no idea of how the world tick-tocked.
There were theories as to the origin of AIDS.
His client (the musician) favored amyl nitrate (poppers).
It explained the lesions—poppers caused the blood to pound against the skin
until the skin developed openings that vented the force of the blood’s attack.
The plan was that after the hairdresser finished with the musician we’d go out
for dinner
and before we went for dinner he’d cut my hair. In New York appearance is
everything
and men who have dark bruises won’t get a look-in for the bruises grow as
complicated as flowers without the origin of their stalks
I contracted the disease much later
and medication is permitting me to live with this old enemy.
I wonder how that actress who had hysterics on the ramparts is doing. I
hope she’s surviving.
Her talent impressed everybody. I assumed her unoriginality would never be
discovered
and time would never tell.
A few acquaintances have survived AIDS without medication because they possess
the gene
that fights the virus and appears to have appeared with the black death.
Another kind of plague is working a job you don’t believe in. Two friends
who happen to be married to each other and who all their lives have been
exhausted capitalists
have saved themselves by taking to Buddhism. Their new calm results from
Meditation—
a technique of sitting still and thinking about the awful facility of thinking.
With persistence one gets below the level of economic governance to a gorgeous
playground
(an everlasting ice-rink) accidentally positioned below the level of thought.
I Met Julia Childs
Jobs turn on the coin of convincing
the unconvinced. In the early eighties I had this job
finding new students for a posh French cooking school
in Chelsea. With prospective students my instructions were not to deviate
from a text placed in front of me. From the introduction to page 25
classical technique was stressed. But when we left my office
wandering among tiles, glass, nails, sheetrock partitions,
on a tour of the presumed school premises
the candidates couldn’t find the classicism. Searching for classicism they
wandered in a mess.
The phone rang and it was a secretary, “Hello, this is Julia Childs’
secretary.” For Julia Childs had heard about this new cooking
school in Chelsea and Julia Childs wanted to come to lunch.
The school was not the least bit ready but when the owner
talked to Julia there was no receding. There was to be a gourmet
lunch to celebrate the idea of the school, in a facility with the feel
of an isle, always abandoned, never to be inhabited,
on Wednesday after next.
In came Julia, to that arranged concrete corner, her personal assistants
and husband with her to enjoy the concrete and the concrete mixer
and what the young chef concocted on the plates. There was vaulting
ambition around that circular table. A great case was stated by the Owner
Principal,
the chef from Strasbourg France, who erected vast delights
as Julia made gentle sketches between the marks engraved by others—
distinguishing real talent from weak ink.
Her revolving interest returned always to her husband opposite.
A long way across the table he was senile and older
and Julia made it known he was a great organizer, purveyor and surely lover.
If he gave such pleasure we hoped there was a little of him left in us.
I quoted Julia (I called her Julia) and had photos of myself with Julia,
Julia with myself. Thus we found students. More than the desired quota.
One became the most popular chef in North America, well, I don’t know about
Canada,
certainly the United States.
I’d talk about the school restaurant—for which they would help create the menu—
insisting the kitchen being state-of-the-art didn’t mean our deal was technique.
“Technique,” (this was pure Julia) “must not intrude
on what is shopped for, chopped, sauced, eaten in a sensual space.”
Julia’s husband was senile but she included him in all dimensions
as she did me on subsequent occasions though she never knew who the hell I was.
There was a notion the school was functional—
which is not to say there weren’t accidents, cuts from kitchen
knives deep enough for hospitals, disagreements over the curriculum
with roots too deep in Haute Cuisine. After graduation a recession
made it difficult for students to find positions, and students
were mocked in kitchens for being Queer or being Women.
A few in that first class were Queer men who died in the first flush of AIDS.
Inevitably the Owner Principal satisfied her ambitions to become a social titan.
The Student who was to become famous was already primed. The Teacher Chef
married the richest student, later marrying women, ever richer, of interesting
cultures
to erect new cuisines. And Julia lived with rumors of alcoholic lesbianism,
of saving France from different revolutions, of slipping
a chicken back in the pot after she had dropped it on the floor
in the early days of TV when there was little editing on account
of actuality happening in the moment on the screen.
Then Julia’s husband didn’t accompany her anymore. He’d passed away.
But she had a mechanism for dealing with evolving matter
whether from too much boiling too much soiling
as bubbles explode, occupying attention
before their journey, deep in the dish at the table’s centre—
“It must be tasted! Mustn’t it! Look at it!”
Appreciation is brother/sister to the transformation bound to happen
when concord is produced and the taste’s sublime.
The Bottom Of Christopher Street
At the bottom, Christopher Street meets a highway.
On the other side is the Hudson. The flow is undetectable. It ain’t
going nowhere.
Journey near complete, I cross over and walk out onto the pier. In the seventies
this pier was ready to fall into the water, it was so decayed.
This was the area for Homo Roaming.
Nobody asked ‘will you marry me?’ as the pier collapsed into the river,
as we let our bodies have their sway.
This new pier has rails not walls so is open to all elements.
It’s a meeting place for Teeny-Pervs, for Hooli-girlie-gans
whose parents have chucked them to the wolves that haunt the democratic streets.
A few miles down is Lucy Liberty, the famed cross-dresser
who stands where the river is neither bay nor river, the bay not yet a bay.
Her real name’s Larry.
This is revealed when she turns towards New Jersey. Nightly, on the sly,
with her back turned towards us, she is on the look-out for foreigners.
Instead of acquiescence
she blares a question not based on the American or any kind of dream.
Lucy wants to know: “WHAT’S THE NAME OF THIS WATER?”
“Strip of Water,” comes an uneducated reply.
A more educated voice proffers, “This is the estuary meeting the Atlantic.”
Lucy Liberty instructs, “WHEN I ASK A QUESTION I PROVIDE THE ANSWER.
I’M THE ONLY ONE PRESENT NOT INCLINED TO OVERPONDER.”
She opens her lips and sexily hisses:
“SEA.”
More Visitors To The Pacific Northwest
A family occupies a chalet
near other chalets
near a brook
that runs to the Pacific across the sand.
In the swimming pool of this facility
the Father of the family
teaches his 3 Daughters
what it is to swim in water
as opposed to float on land.
From the pool’s edge this Gorgeous Father
like a prophet lift throws his Daughters
squarely smashing.
Someone non-religious mentioned
Baptism is synonymous with damage
in Swimming Pool Ocean Lake or Font.”
Across the highway
outside a forest
a Veteran Youngster
with a Budding Patriarch
loiter at a sign
WOODLAND PATH
then, discovering there is no trial,
wander among fallen trunks.
Sound of water
magnifies sounds of traffic.
Is looking deep into a situation
tantamount to being lost?
On the cliff a modern edifice peers down
while chalets in the forest lap eyelashes with flirtatious glance.
A Japanese Lover sleeps on the terrace
viewed by the Ocean.
Inside a Splendid Divorcee naps on her sofa.
It’s her house.
The Lover is delighted with sleep’s adulation
which fades him into a grey steel fluctuation
of cloudy water, watery cloud.
The house is lofty
on account of non-communion
(silent phones sit easy)
—though always they press on each other’s senses
with his bare torso, her red pants.
In a traditional house with mirrors
a Host prepares a recreant avocado dip.
In the evening
glass reflecting the Pacific
will reflect
‘Youth with Patriarch’
‘Lover with Divorcee’
‘Family that swims’.
In this cold August
the Host is dressed for early winter.
In his antique glass collection
for every guest
there is a glass of different century and shape.
If this Host is manifold of anything
he’s manifold of means.
On the beach after dinner
‘Host’
‘Family that swims’
‘Youth with Patriarch’
‘Lover with Divorcee’
stand in awe of the body of a Fish that in death
retains its glamour—an Enormous Ray.
This Fish’s Wife had no understanding
that her husband’s wish while dying
was to be transported outside the Ocean.
“Is this rational?
In the water famous for your dance
you want your darling body to recline on earth
where suffocation lies?”
Visitors to the Pacific
south of
Canada
north of Patagonia
find this Fish in its dead state ascetic
due not to the miracle
of loaves and fishes.
But
does a Fish in a dead state
prove the limit is
close at hand?
Music Hath Charms
or
Let’s Be Frank
1.
Every once in a while an authority states:
“Music is the supreme expression.” (Authorities love to get in their two cents.)
As far as singing goes (STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT) this supreme expression
rests with the voice—turning on its revolving, revolving on its turning, in the
void .
I had this lover who played Sinatra over and over. Now!
I’ve seen a video of Sinatra on the boardwalk with the Mafia
(SET UM UP JOE). On that gangster boardwalk
Sinatra is an antique youth embedded in a violent plight.
JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS betrays his criminal nonchalance.
START SPREADING THE NEWS has gangster dominance.
I DID IT MY WAY is cruelly masturbatory.
“You’ll be allowed to play with mine if you promise not to make it yours.”
2.
I met this guy even older than me who took me to the Opera and bought me
clothes.
We went to Wagner, clip-clopping to the Opera House across the Plaza.
It was a destination, somewhere to go.
Have you seen them what goes to the Opera?
The Knowledged Ancient with the Acknowledged Old!
Them what’s Rich and Queer and Bold!
When Wagner’s on the program they come in droves,
for Wagner is the beginning of their existential souls.
But listen to this—Wagner was such a patriot
for the sake of his talent he had to strike a balance.
Searching around for a race to hate he chose the Jews.
3.
I’ve got a man who can’t live without me.
Says, “Let’s stay in. Have a good time! I’ll prepare the food.”
In the bedroom the action of his penetration
is the action of the rowing of a boat. He must have owned a boat.
To help with his rowing he puts on a CD—an offshoot of Hip Hop entangled with
Rap,
plenty of the ‘B’ word, consistently the ‘N’ word, they really
express the ‘C’ word,
they love to sneer ‘Fag’
In terms of tonality I detect an influence of THE FLYING DUTCHMAN,
intimations of an aria intoned by Mister Sinatra, a.k.a. Old Blue Eyes.
Call him Frank—if you butter your experience dead in the centre
avoiding all contact with the crust.
The HyperTexts