Gay Love Poetry

by Neil Powell (ed)

Saying sweet wild things — ‘I was dead,

  It was sad’ — and you gripped tight my hand

  As you stared into infinite space.

  I turned, trembling, to cover my tears,

  While you in your fever continued

  To talk and to call out my name:

  Then, grief beyond grief, it was over.

  I ought to have died in your place

  As you stood there waving goodbye ...

  And now there is no more to say,

  But pardon, just God, my audacity.

  WILFRED OWEN

  Fragment: I saw his round mouths crimson ...

  I saw his round mouths crimson deepen as it fell,

  Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;

  Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,

  Clouding, half gleam, half glower,

  And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.

  And in his eyes

  The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,

  In different skies.

  J. R. ACKERLEY

  Missing

  To F.H.

  We never knew what became of him, that was so curious;

  He embarked, it was late in November, and never returned;

  No time for farewells and the journey so far and precarious;

  A few letters reached us long after and came to an end.

  The weeks lingered on into months and again to November;

  We troubled the officials, of course, and they cabled about,

  They were patient but busy, importunities without number;

  Some told us one thing, some another, they never found out.

  There’s a lot go like that, I suppose, with no explanation,

  And death is death, after all, small comfort to know where and when;

  But I keep thinking, now that we’ve dropped the investigation:

  It was more like the death of an insect than that of a man.

  This beetle, for instance; I lower my boot now to crush it,

  And who’s to correct me, correct me? Who is to know?

  I do not ask whether the other beetles will miss it,

  Or God will say ‘Where is my beetle? Where did it go?’

  The life and the tiny delight, the sublime fabrication

  Of colour, mechanics and form, I care nothing about;

  I a man with his mind, the master, the lord of creation;

  This beetle impedes me, offends me, I lower my boot.

  And that was the way that he went. Yes, I see the rejoinder:

  He was one of us, bound with us, shod with the violence and pride

  Of man in his militant madness, of man the contender ...

  But he was my friend and that was the way that he died.

  JOHN HEATH-STUBBS

  In Memory

  A scruffy beer drinkers’ club, a basement

  In a side street off the Charing Cross Road —

  No introductions, and no names exchanged.

  And then my room, a cellar

  Under the pavement, near Lancaster Gate.

  He spoke of the outback, of Ned Kelly —

  A wild colonial boy with do-it-yourself armour —

  Reproached me for my self-indulgent guilt.

  ‘Nailed upon your private cross,’ he said.

  And, after that — it was not satisfactory:

  Neither of us exactly young — for him

  Only the second time with another man, he told me.

  But, later on, I recognized (I was in America) his photo

  Upon the cover of a magazine.

  Unmistakable the balding head,

  The battered face, broad shouldered stocky body.

  I wondered if we’d ever meet again,

  And if we did by chance, would he remember,

  Or take it as a threat? But that

  Was three decades ago and some years more.

  And now a voice upon the air-waves tells me

  That he is gone. He’s dead and celebrated,

  And then they played an interview

  Recorded some years back. But residence

  In England had quite sandpapered away

  All the Australian vowels. But I am grieving —

  Grieving for a little twig of love

  That never blossomed — could not, should not blossom,

  Among the debris of my journey’s sidewalk.

  THOM GUNN

  In the Post Office

  Saw someone yesterday who looked like you did,

  Being short with long blond hair, a sturdy kid

  Ahead of me in line. I gazed and gazed

  At his good back, feeling again, amazed,

  That almost envious sexual tension which

  Rubbing at made the greater, like an itch,

  An itch to steal or otherwise possess

  The brilliant restive charm, the boyishness

  That half aware — and not aware enough —

  Of what it did, eluded to hold off

  The very push of interest it begot,

  As if you’d been a tease, though you were not.

  I hadn’t felt it roused, to tell the truth,

  In several years, that old man’s greed for youth,

  Like Pelias’s that boiled him to a soup,

  Not since I’d had the sense to cover up

  My own particular seething can of worms,

  And settle for a friendship on your terms.

  Meanwhile I had to look: his errand done,

  Without a glance at me or anyone,

  The kid unlocked his bicycle outside,

  Shrugging a backpack on. I watched him ride

  Down 18th Street, rising above the saddle

  For the long plunge he made with every pedal,

  Expending far more energy than needed.

  If only I could do whatever he did,

  With him or as part of him, if I

  Could creep into his armpit like a fly,

  Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch,

  Instead of having to stand back and watch.

  Oh complicated fantasy of intrusion

  On that young sweaty body. My confusion

  Led me at length to recollections of

  Another’s envy and his confused love.

  That Fall after you died I went again

  To where I had visited you in your pain

  But this time for your — friend, roommate, or wooer?

  I seek a neutral term where I’m unsure.

  He lay there now. Figuring she knew best,

  I came by at his mother’s phoned request

  To pick up one of your remembrances,

  A piece of stained-glass you had made, now his,

  I did not even remember, far less want.

  To him I felt, likewise, indifferent.

  ‘You can come in now,’ said the friend-as-nurse.

  I did, and found him altered for the worse.

  But when he saw me sitting by his bed,

  He would not speak, and turned away his head.

  I had not known he hated me until

  He hated me this much, hated me still.

  I thought that we had shared you more or less,

  As if we shared what no one might possess,

  Since in a net we sought to hold the wind.

  There he lay on the pillow, mortally thinned,

  Weaker than water, yet his gesture proving

  As steady as an undertow. Unmoving,

  In the sustained though slight aversion, grim

  In wordlessness. Nothing deflected him,

  Nothing I did and nothing I could say.

  And so I left. I heard he died next day.

  I have imagined that he still could taste

  That bitterness and anger to the last,

  Against the roles he saw me in because

  He had to: of victor, as he thought I was,

  Of heir, as to the cherished property

  His mother — who
knows why? — was giving me,

  And of survivor, as I am indeed,

  Recording, so that I may later read

  Of what has happened, whether between sheets,

  Or in post offices, or on the streets.

  Post Script: The Panel

  Reciprocation from the dead. Having finished the post-office poem, I think I will take a look at the stained-glass panel it refers to, which C made I would say two years before he died.

  I fish it out from where I have kept it, between a filing cabinet and a small chest of drawers. It has acquired a cobweb, which I brush off before I look at it. In the lower foreground are a face with oriental features and an arm, as of someone lying on his stomach: a mysteriously tiered cone lies behind and above him. What I had forgotten is that the picture is surrounded on all four sides by the following inscription:

  The needs of ghosts embarrass the living. A ghost must eat and shit, must pack his body someplace. Neither buyer nor bundle, a ghost has no tally, no readjusting value, no soul counted at a bank.

  Is this an excerpt from some Chinese book of wisdom, or is it C himself speaking? When he made the panel, C may have already suspected he had aids, but the prescience of the first sentence astonishes me — as it does also that I remembered nothing of the inscription while writing the poem but looked it up immediately on finishing it.

  Yes, the needs of him and his friend to ‘embarrass me after their deaths. The dead have no sense of tact, no manners, they enter doors without knocking, but I continue to deal with them, as proved by my writing the poem. They pack their bodies into my dreams, they eat my feelings, and shit in my mind. They are no good to me, of no value to me, but I cannot shake them and do not want to. Their story, being part of mine, refuses to reach an end. They present me with new problems, surprise me, contradict me, my dear, my everpresent dead.

  NEIL POWELL

  Hundred River

  In memory of Adam Johnson 1965-93

  We came to Hundred River through a slow October,

  when earth is scented with everybody’s past;

  when late scabbed blackberries harden into devil’s scars,

  untasted apples rot to bitter toffee.

  Across reed-beds a track of blackened railway-sleepers,

  a plank-bridge lapped by barely-stirring water;

  swans gargling silently in their fine indifference;

  above, a sky of urgent discursive geese.

  Now the year has turned again and I am alone here,

  where willow-herb’s dry white whiskers drift over

  the brick-red spikes of sorrel and the gossiping reeds;

  and the river sullen, muddied after rain.

  No movement in the woods but stealthy growth of fungus,

  hesitant leaf-drop, distant scuttle of deer:

  in one marbled, stained oak-leaf I sense gigantic change,

  and in the drizzle feel the season fracture.

  STEVE CRANFIELD

  Give Me Back My Man

  In memoriam Ricky Wilson

  I have a secret love. My heart is burning.

  But will he play the game? I know some tricks.

  I’ll fall into his strong arms like a fix.

  I’ll stir some unmet, deep, unconscious yearning

  In his man’s breast. Passion will mount. Tides turning.

  His swelling manhood pressed. To mine. Limbs mix.

  He’ll see the light. (I’ve known since I was six.)

  All parts rhyme. Yearning, burning and returning.

  Surrendering the all I have to give.

  I’ve got you under my skin. Now each day’s

  Dawning will bring discoveries, new ways

  To mesh us. Never split. Infinitive.

  Vows, hearts exchanged. We’ll die of love. Clichés,

  Like viruses, need our fresh blood to live.

  ROBERT COCHRANE

  A Private View

  for Andrew Heard

  It was a day like yesterday

  we left the crowd behind,

  a day of rare sun

  and clean breezes

  on the balcony above the river,

  and I recall the rise below

  of childrens voices.

  It seemed private.

  I’d sensed small clues,

  odd details in mail,

  our voices within wire,

  and you were suddenly thinner.

  Skirting the subject,

  blaming overwrought concern

  I mentioned a friends mother

  almost died of pneumonia,

  but you said blankly

  ‘Mine is a very special kind.’

  The bomb and the penny fell.

  I just hugged you.

  Loss of hope at times

  stalls the urge to cry

  and in the face of your brave one,

  mine said nothing.

  You said things I’d read,

  heard from interviews.

  ‘Not accepting it as terminal.

  Fighting this.’

  Desperate,

  I conjured with

  names of long survivors,

  but you cut through

  ‘At what cost though?’

  From all the words

  in my world of them

  I could muster none,

  my mind reeling

  at such savage progress.

  Distant from the crowd,

  these fragments of exchange

  felt personal,

  unseen,

  but some months

  since your funeral,

  a friend met there

  recalled our exit

  from the gallery.

  His asking who I was.

  Her informative reply.

  They watched us

  in the distance

  like some silent film,

  and as I hugged you

  she turned to say ‘I think he’s told him.’

  JOEL LANE

  Michel Foucault

  Your illness was bad enough. The frantic rush to finish that last book

  when the work could never be finished.

  All your life, you’d wanted to be a chisel

  and not a statue. You’d struck history

  at an angle, exposing the fault lines;

  always leaning, because the world

  was tilted. Pleasure came late,

  peace never at all. You were locked back

  in your first prison, ‘the black stone

  of the body’ — passive, inscribed

  with the stigmata of someone else’s

  knowledge. The chisels of loss

  took your resistance — then chipped away

  the shells, one skin at a time. Prayer

  and sweat, a damaged being; the things

  you went to California to escape.

  Full circle. Just as you’d written it:

  how the human clay was mass-formed

  in factories, schools, prisons, hospitals;

  in the confession box, on the couch.

  Did you guess how you’d be reborn

  as an Icarus on the point of falling —

  a postmodern icon, made up of dots

  on a screen, revelations on a glossy page?

  All the private details: the handcuffs,

  the molten wax? Hacks consigned you

  to the prison of the flashbulb. A fuck

  doesn’t merit death or facile celebrity.

  But you always knew. There’s no place

  called freedom. Only these words, these

  movements; a level exchange of glances.

  ADAM JOHNSON

  The Playground Bell

  Dead drunk by nine — this used to be enough.

  In Manchester I went out every night;

  Picked up and stayed wherever there was drink

  With men whose names were last thing on my mind —

  Including one who slung the Union Jack

&
nbsp; Over his bedside lamp for atmosphere

  On the Last Night of the Proms in eighty-two;

  My first ‘experience’: even the white socks

  I’d been advised to wear were a success —

  One foot displayed, half-casually, to mark

  My absolute virginity. The final touch:

  My mother fixed a blow-wave in my hair.

  Always indulgent towards her only son

  (Lucky for me my parents got divorced),

  She must have sensed I wasn’t the same boy

  Who’d walked for twenty miles or more a day

  On gritstone tracks, over the backs of hills —

  The Pennine wastes of Bleaklow, Kinder Scout.

  The landscape of the city was more harsh:

  Bleaker than any tract of mountain peat,

  The bus ride down the Manchester Old Road.

  In Sackville Street, between the Thomson’s Arms

  And the Rembrandt Hotel, a universe

  Peopled by drunks and rent boys — one a punk,

  Who used to leave his girlfriend at the bar

  On business. After barely half an hour,

  He’d stroll back in and stand them both a drink.

  I quickly learned the language and the code —

  Had ‘sisters’ who were kind men twice my age,

  Who paid for beers and thought I was mature;

  Confided, gave advice and lent me fares.

  On Saturday nights we’d drive to Liverpool

  Or Stoke-on-Trent, as if there were a difference

  Between one seedy night-spot and another —

  Though local accents used to turn me on,

  And that rare prize — a genuine foreigner

  On holiday, was worth the taxi ride

  To some remote hotel. Leaving in secret,

  Before breakfast, pocketing an address

  (In Paris!) I would never write to, a poignant act.