PAUL WILKINS
My Tired Darlings
My tired darlings, with what swift
tact they leave before its light.
Their January steps crack ice, the clear glass
breaks to webs; my darlings pace to
families, overdrafts, subtleties.
They wake to noon in their beds,
thinking through speeches that for them
are regret or revenge or that one long truth.
They work in bars, in whitewashed attics
they suck at their smoking lives,
they talk of their children who need them more,
they press hands flat across aching eyes.
Their explanations to tomorrow
flicker in their throats like injured things.
They have to get back, my tired darlings;
they are wanting to be elsewhere and themselves.
Their tongues flick swiftly across upper lips,
tasting what hasn’t happened.
You can imagine it, its on a Tuesday,
there’s no one who knows.
They don’t want much of this, my darlings,
but tired white fleshes lie down again,
fat candles blub their wax, a voice is dressing afterwards
and murmuring the number of a cab-firm.
I love them, their moments of winning,
thinking they choose their havens and departures.
Knowing the long world wants them for its own,
they pat their pockets for keys, small change.
MARC ALMOND
The Puerto Rican GoGo Boy
The Puerto Rican gogo boy
Gyrates in front of me,
Hard body of the slums,
Hard mind of the street.
He has his two front teeth missing,
When he grins
His face resembles a splintered fence.
He has spots on his cheeks
Dope in his eyes Murder on his fingers
(Not in his heart)
Only ‘mom’ in his heart.
On his shoulder a purple sore
That draws me in Fascinated:
On his forearm his true
Love etched into his flesh
With a rusty switch
He thrusts
And his cock bounces joyfully
Against the satin finish
Of his black Adidas shorts,
To the muffled disco beat
He strips,
And grins
And you’ve just got to love him.
And he juts his hips towards you,
A five dollar bill tucked into the elastic waistband
Of his black Adidas shorts:
Bringing you a Latin word of love in your ear
And perhaps a sloppy kiss if you’re over forty
And loaded:
It worries me,
I got a sloppy kiss, the word of love.
He sits
Legs apart on a small stool
To remove his cheap trainers,
His grubby white socks.
He grins and rubs his crotch,
The over forties go wild
With the five dollar bills.
He removes his shorts,
His dick is average
And refuses to harden,
He tugs it, twangs it
Pulls it and pummels it:
It died!
The (lucky) few at the front
Get to gum it,
Slurping and spitting it.
The Puerto Rican gogo boy dances on
To ‘Call Me’ by Blondie,
To ‘Disco Inferno’ by the Tramps.
I follow the tracks up his arms
To gaze at the purple sore.
The torso a tight washboard,
A steaming ploughed farm field;
The muscles gold and defiant.
He loves his work.
Afterwards ten dollars buys you a private show.
His name is Roberto.
DAVID KINLOCH
In Brompton Cemetery
Quiet seeps in
on the bellied drone
of planes.
A patter of squirrel
feet fall like rain
across the tombs
and spirit my
glance to Prince
Bibesco. Moss
unletters his name;
so many half-
caught: widow
of, infant, dearly.
Grass ears fritter
away and offer
occasional unknown
wild-flowers, the
tangled dark
at the bole of trees,
half a bench
fraying into shadow.
Pigeons examining
my feet are far
from ghosts
and only Richard
Tauber’s grave
sings against
forgetfulness,
bedecked in pansies,
the high C of a single
iris. Lichens
resist each note
we strike here,
the true tenor of it:
just web and brief
silver, the beaten body
of the earth.
A strafe of
melon seeds
pave you to the picket
fence of a white
quiet canton
and the rip boys
aged 21 or 23 who
served, defended, rest.
Other ones pad by
outside in designer
names that flare
the cemetery blur,
ignite the spokes
of lycrad cyclers
who lap them, alight
among unconsecrated
colonnades and await
the tryst. Pot-bellies
amble their desire
among the athletes
and there the game
of seek and seek
begins: a lithe
of muscle suns
its walkman on
a slab: his silver
shades annealed
like salamanders
to his eyes.
A hot wind uplifts
choruses of stares
across the unkempt
stones and all aches
to be fenced
in a corner,
asked for a momentary
name. A little blond
manfully defends
his plot, watches
the slow summer-
stunned bee crash
the asphalt, shed
a wing and wipe its eyes.
JOEL LANE
The Outline of a House
Its safe, you say, nobody walks
through here. Its not a street any more,
just a blind alley. At this corner
they’re demolishing a house. But nobody
works at this time of night. Follow
me through the scaffolding. This way.
This was a bed, it could have been
our bed — this paved rectangle
between a shallow trench and a wall.
This was someone’s roof, this brick height
that nurtures a bleached flower, while
stars hang like pollen in a distant shaft.
Crouching, you pull me down to the pavement
like a condemned building. I lift you
until your filament burns itself out
and a shattered moth flies to the dust.
We are holding each other. This
is home. We can leave it behind.
STEVE ANTHONY
Life Drawing
for Clive
If we’d been straight, coming out
of our station off the last train,
you wouldn’t have noted the fit of my jeans
as I pushed through the ticket barrier.
I might not ha
ve seen the small red pin
on the charcoal lapel of your overcoat;
you wouldn’t have shot me a look
among the late suburban stragglers,
and I definitely wouldn’t have followed,
paused, followed you down that dark alley
where you’d stopped for a piss (you smiled
Got alight? — of course, I carry matches);
I’d never have kissed you, fallen to my knees
in the bushes, your belt buckle clanking
as somebody passed only feet away;
I wouldn’t have walked you home by the lake
where the moon made pearls of the sleeping geese
and a screech owl drew us closer.
And maybe if we hadn’t done all of this,
though we never did turn into lovers,
we’d have missed this other sharing —
talking through lines of Gunn or Hockney
as you sketch me on your bed,
my only prop a finger of whisky.
ADAM JOHNSON
Early November
The day was gold early and I went out under the wind
Over the vivid leaves as they were singing in whispers —
A high day with a blue brim riding the roof-backs,
Leaving the trees red in amazement at their own brightness.
Down Piccadilly to the Circus on a sleak fourteen,
I went, in my long coat, into the heart of town,
Alighted, danced with several people, kissed one I knew
Whose cheek was blushed with cold, called at a bar in Poland Street,
And overheard the discourse of a dozen thirsty souls.
The day was cold early and I went back in sudden rain
Under lamps, by windows flushed with light in upper rooms,
Among people dancing out of offices and stores
Into the brilliant streets and the cool ballroom of evening,
Over the dark-drowned leaves that were singing in whispers.
R.M. VAUGHAN
10 Reasons Why I Fall in Love with
Inaccessible Straight Boys Every Damn Time
1. cause when he laughs at my jokes or tells me he likes my
clothes it can’t be anything but the truth.
2. straight boys speak a foreign tongue I never learned —
a semaphore of scruffy chin tugs, bearish shoulders, and
dead dog easy posture, straight boys can spit, far, and
seem to like urinals.
3. a straight boy will always hate opera and will never, ever
play some god-awful Whitney Houston record before he
feels you up on the couch — straight boys like guitars.
4. cause foreign films are for girls with glasses or nervous
Anglican boys who went to private school — and Yes,
Thank You, he does eat meat.
5. straight boys don’t trust their fathers either.
6. a straight boy will wear a tight T-shirt no matter how fat
he is. I call this Innocence.
7. ok, yes, even if does have three kids and two monthly car
payments and at least one house he still has more money
than most of the fags I know and Money = Relaxation.
8. cause once I went to the Y and I swear to God four
straight boys massaged each other buck naked and talked
about body fat ratios and not one got hard or even a little
glassy-eyed and I knew, I knew I was on another planet
and I have always wanted to see the stars up close.
9. straight boys remind me of children — big, hapless, grown-up
children with sex organs it would be right and legal
and far more interesting to touch.
10. because women don’t really trust them, they’d be better off with me.
LAWRENCE SCHIMEL
Using the Poets Bathroom
for R.H.
The Greeks were only half correct
that a woman might turn mens flesh hard as stone;
yours, perhaps, would not grow erect
at the sight of her, but of her own she has
complete control. Looking inward,
so like mirrors’ truths, Maude, too, turned stone: topaz
gems that floated in her bladder.
You tell this tale to explain why, like a male
dog, she lifts one leg to splatter
the black plastic sacks of garbage with her scent,
a splendid anecdote about
your discovery that she was a latent
hermaphrodite. But there is more
at stake than regaling friends on midnight walks
with Maude, who had waited hours
for your return without an accident. Such
is the devotion of women
and dogs; the strength of will to endure so much
time alone, sustained only by
the idea of commitment to them. Maude
held tight to her purpose. The gay
mans best friend, it was not in imitative
flattery she tried to grow a
penis, but because she recognized your love
of sameness over difference.
A threshold she could not fully cross, her attempts
at genital enlargements
contradicted your earlier lines: a choice
that always, when there is a door,
even a French one, must be made. Sacrifice
her identity, though she tried,
Maude was left whining about sex and her
crepuscular gender, outside
your bathroom door. In that earlier poem,
Max, too, whined; for both dogs the word
toilet clearly suggests the twilight, some
subliminal ending. They were
restricted to those parlours overflowing
with your public life, books and art:
needlepoint pugs on pillows, porcelain pugs,
pugs in every medium, all gifts.
Pigs, too, for they had monopolized your thoughts
before your vowels lengthened. On
an island of vowels, Odysseus
had come to know and love swine.
Returned to Ithaca, his sole memento
amori was a piggy bank —
two copulating corpulent pigs into
whose corpulent bellies he dropped coins
for his sons wedding. Only his faithful dog,
after sniffing at the mans loins,
had recognized him. Though too short to reach
men’s crotches, Maude could smell where your
true affections lay. In your bathroom, where flesh
is exposed from its civilized
garb, ostensibly free from all onlookers
except that narcissean gaze,
there is no room for animals. Photographs
of men cover every surface
(the ceiling even!) as if this were a hive,
each man locked into his own frame
like a cell of memory’s honey, and when
the shower fills the room with steam
these boys, unlike bees, do not flee. Mentors, friends,
lovers, the men who have shaped your life,
it was yet too soon to know if I would stand
among their ranks. I stood before
their ancient glittering eyes and unzipped my
pants. I could not hope to compare.
III LADS’ LOVE
____________________________
Love poetry — regardless of sexuality — has always had a natural inclination to celebrate the beauty and desirability of subjects who are significantly younger than their admiring authors (also regardless of the fact that the young are ignorant, vain, selfish, unreliable ...). This section includes poems which lament the passing of youth (as the ancient Greeks and Romans almost invariably do); which record the poets devotion to
a younger lover (Shakespeare, Ackerley); or which recall a time, perhaps only the day before yesterday, when both poet and subject were equally youthful — most of the poets towards the end of the chapter were, after all, still in their twenties at the time of writing the poems. It even includes one or two hints about all that ignorance, vanity and so forth.
The longest item here, Richard Essendens ‘Effects’, is a beautifully balanced sequence about a man-boy relationship which begins in the authors adolescence and develops into a long-term affair: it is a fitting reminder that while an anthology such as this one may be divided into more or less arbitrary sections, life itself bridges the divisions in sometimes unexpected ways; it is also, I think, a marvellous piece of writing.
SOLON
Translated by J. A. Symonds
‘Blest is the man
Blest is the man who loves and after early play
Whereby his limbs are supple made and strong,
Retiring to his house, with wine and song
Toys with a fair boy on his breast the livelong day!
ALCAEUS
Translated by Mark Beech
‘You’re getting hairy legs . . .’
You’re getting hairy legs, Nicander;
Soon you’ll have a bristly bum.
Gay Love Poetry Page 6