The Original Gay Porn Community - Free Gay Movies and Photos, Gay Porn Site Reviews and Adult Gay Forums

  • Welcome To Just Us Boys - The World's Largest Gay Message Board Community

    In order to comply with recent US Supreme Court rulings regarding adult content, we will be making changes in the future to require that you log into your account to view adult content on the site.
    If you do not have an account, please register.
    REGISTER HERE - 100% FREE / We Will Never Sell Your Info

    To register, turn off your VPN; you can re-enable the VPN after registration. You must maintain an active email address on your account: disposable email addresses cannot be used to register.

Poems


mama

i. the price of ashes

We’ve left this heat on far too long. A day this grey needs coolness, a day when you are wrapped in a blanket with one cigarette hanging from your lips in the middle of a phone call with your father is a day when you need a bit of cold air.
He says,
“I moved your mother over there to the dining room table. In some ways things haven’t changed. I talk and she says nothing. I asked where she put things and she doesn’t know. In some ways they’re different. Now she doesn’t argue.”

We wonder about these expensive and unpaid for ashes.
“I read there are whole places filled with bodies they never got around to. If they ask for the money we can say, how do we even know it’s her? This could be a congregation.
kitty litter or three Chihuahuas maybe.”

Of course, this plastic box with a name is the same thing as a place holder. It is not you, but the door to you.
It keeps you with us just a big longer,
gives you a place in the world you left so swiftly.

Every time I get sentimental I remember how
unsentimental you were
Every time I think of your smiling face
I remember it usually frowned

I prayed every night, every night worried about
your passing and me in this world with you gone
That last night I let you go and the next morning,
you were gone.

I’ve seen shows where on the last episode the patriarch
dies
But this is dishonest,
in the real world, the pain of the passing is the show goes on
The show goes on for season after season,
year after year
And in all that you are not here
I knew the grief was coming, feared it, felt it prophesied,
looked at you and saw a specter standing at my side

After the howling grief, after the lightning struck rage that doubled me to the floor,
after the wailing, and more,
the numbness,
after I slept on the floor seven days and seven nights and reached
into the darkness for you,
after I cursed you for going where I could not follow,
I come into the light and bathe again, and I am afraid again,
clinging again, often mad again, and then,
remembering these are still the first days of things,
go back to the beginnings of things
Because I cannot believe you are dead, I cannot believe in death
Because the sun rises and songs are sung,
I cannot believe in my despair

We are like those pioneers who lost a mama on the road,
and stopped to bury you like seed once planted, never sowed
and then moved on, swift on our way.
We had to keep going,
we could not stay
 
MAMA CONCLUDED



ii kaddish

On the Sabbath we rejoice before God, we call out at Kaddish, be honored, be honored, the voices of mourners mount behind and around, and as we weep at the passing of life, we welcome all births, then do it again.
The loss is real, the fear is real, the black beast stronger than you that is you is real, the wrestling is real, the dark is there. And so is the life and so is the light. The last time I saw you I held you hand, kissed your cheeks, knew I would never kiss them again, knew we’d place you on the pyre, knew we’d give you to the fire, all I touched and loved and clasped, sifts through my fingers grey rough ash
what remains is the memory.


Put out your hand and wait for the gift
Ask for the blessing of the mother
You were told the world was formed in evil and fought the battle of strife
Here lies the door to black magic
Trust and wait, all things are communion with you, open your eyes and crack your heart
This nothingness is the way to all things

This playing ends in the soul flying from the body to hover over and gently return, ends in the sighing and the inability to catch breath, the crossing of the hundred miles of space between you and me when we stare into eyes and crack like a drop of oil in the water







iii after the storm

After we have lived in the storm of the sentiment of things
the truth rings like tin on the ears,
how long before you were gone you were going, how little we got on,
frequent arguments, how the holidays are easier now because they are cheaper,
how when singing carols I remember you never liked them anyway
I think you never got over your own mourning
That whole last year you kept talking about your mother,
how she died so young, how she could still be around now,
and perhaps you were no longer interested in being around
either
You certainly never showed it.

If I say, I won’t go out with you anymore, then I must remember we didn’t really go out before
If I say I will never hold your hand I must remember you couldn’t bear to have it held until you were leaving,
if I say I will never embrace you, then I have to remember you refrained from embraces,
You had a list of things to be done one day,
and then one day you simply did not come


Now I realize every grey thought I had was the memory of your death hanging over my head,
if I picture the place I am in, it is the white house on grey sand,
and the grey blue water washing the old tide in
 
solstice

On the longest night of the year I listened to a horrible lessons and carols.
I surrounded my self in other stories I hadn’t heard
and filled myself with light and food.
They say we are going into the time of darkness,
though for months now every night was dimmer
and every night was darker,
you have to pull the weights off your back.
They say winter is on its way and hardship may come but
they don’t know the hardship has happened.
You make merry to chase this winter away,
but you sing to remember you’re still here.
Remember every day the white snow falls is every day
the day grows longer,
remember the you that you were and
look at the you you are, remember how impossible
resurrection seemed and then look at the scars all on
your hands and see, printed in your palms,
something like rejoicing.

keeping the feast

In the old days when belief was not mistaken for triumph
and dogma had not replaced love,
in times before this had been split from that,
the festival could be held,
you could keep it up with several people for days on end.
Now, with a different kind of joy, I keep the feast alone.
These days there is the festival of music,
and now and again on circuits they see each other,
hear this band, smoke this pot, and there is the remnant of the holy day,
the Mass barely endured that makes a festival of the Lord,
and there is the dinner table that self martyring mothers set up,
serving up dishes to their infinite suffering,
the bufferin mama took to stay all day on her feet,
sifting out the wheat of joy and lust from every celebration
But once these things were one.
Once when we still knew the steps to walk,
when we remembered how to talk the sacred speech,
we gathered in holy delight, day after day, to re examine the miracle,
to light the candles, filling glasses with the wine of wonder,
beating drums echoing the thunder of heaven.
We knew how to keep the feast.

But since you do not,
since you do not,
since you do not know to believe, and you have fallen to
your depression,
the theologian to tired digressions,
I will rise and keep the feast,
I keep the feast until you can.

the way of the world

Listening to her educated talk
I bawked and
stopped myself from saying,
you are a moron.
But she was,
and just moronic enough to do
well in the moronic world
 
matchbooks

I saw,
on the back of a metaphorical matchbook,
a poster that said,
“live the life of a writer without ever
writing a word.”
whoever heard of something so silly?
Ah,
but the world is that silly.
It always has been.




from now on

You have to turn your back sometimes
and let things figure themselves out,
you have to stop listening or listen with half an ear,
or grab a beer and a grain of salt because you know
white men have no souls,
that’s why they roll around like ghosts before they’re even dead.
This is not the time to do a thing but scratch your head
and accept the bullshit of his being.
This is why you will not write poems about him or
about your friends or about the children who will
not pull through.
From now on you will write about the rivers and the everlasting hills,
you will write about more than the more than the more
than the paying of bills,
with the blessedness of a saint you will stop caring about the pills
he’s popping and the life he’s wasting.
You will not worry that she moves in circles and circles so quickly
she catches her ass in her teeth,
you will move beyond the mother worry,
you will hurry to the grove,
away from madness and delight in me



because i delighted

Because I delighted in being the poet I get up and
I take this time to be so silent,
to sit by a grey lit window and wait for words to come,
well no,
wait sounds so passive, sounds dishonest.
Pursue them,
have another cigarette.

Because I want more than anything to be this, I do it,
I do it at the cost of my throbbing head,
do it before going back to bed.
 
writing poetry at new years

This is exactly how I thought it would be,
half sleepy on the grey morning,
the first Sunday of the year
I knew I would end up sitting here before
this keyboard with a cup of coffee
Oh, the people who do not write talk
about notebooks and pen,
they don’t see a hundred things that precede
thought cause they don’t know this work--it is like breathing.
That is why we’re here, because if we aren’t
doing this, we simply
are
not



for

You can have that and you can have this,
and all I have of it is yours
But this, this is for me.
You have to have to remember the things
that are for you and you alone

Learn to look without lusting,
look with the longing to
worship and
not the need
to eat
or
be eaten




this time of day this turn of light

At the end of the day
Before the sun sets
Get yourself out to the black and green
river and walk the beer bottle coast,
let your feet crunch on the dead snow
and map out the tracings of wintertime branches.
The white of sycamore trees
leans with you and tilts with me into the black water,
and geese with more tolerance than us
and no time for Texas go in backward
schools along the water, none of them
alarmed when the river
goes its own way
 
she went to Georgia

Told me the other day of being down in
Georgia crying over someone four years
gone,
and talked of how beautiful it was,
sixty degrees and no snow the way
that only people from Indiana who
go somewhere else to escape
themselves talk.

Come back to the cold,
walk by the side of the frozen river
and let me teach you to be happy
in the winter,
happy in the snapping of twigs
and the hardness of things

6 am at Loyola beach

And you said traveling I would find some healing,
and I have found some healing,
things grew so small sitting under a big sky,
dragging my feet through water wide as the sea,
I took a parfait picture of the scene,
tripartite colors, brown, blue, blue green
I waited for the dark’ning of the land
The thick’ning of the clouds
The rain began
We have come this far for this baptism





enos

And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.
Genesis 4:26

The morning of poetry starts out grey, it always seems to be that way, and now, on Sunday morning
I have sung the hymns, I have sat quiet in the house
of God and understood that I do not understand,
the song is a lapwing, and the reading a hound,
and the profound litany a stag that carries me I know
not where,
and the lollards said: translate it into English,
but even my own language is a translation
out of mystery,
Help me to see the song sung before me
The first and only prayer
Help us
Help me
 
flight into egypt

I nearly took the tree down then
Amen,
I hung it up in lights again
Amen
And at the great epiphany
Amen
The lights were white, and gold for thee

At epiphany the wise women came, three magi came, three hags, three witches too, the camels and the lions and the tigers and bears, the camel drivers, the hares, they came with gold and frankincense and pomegranates and
advice.

They sat the virgin mary down and said, listen dearie, listen, you gotta know some things, you gotta know. And they said, away we go, you must come with
The story of the angel and joseph’s dream is just another way of saying this.
You must come to Egypt, there is no better place for alchemy
Come to Egypt, herod the king is coming for your baby
And herod is just another name for that which is old and past its time

And we enjoyed the songs and carols, the punch and multi colored lights
But they are past their time
The baby in the manger is past his time, and so, in a train of many people, many tigers, many meanings, Mary at the head of them, they fold up the set and leave Bethlehem, and I have stacked them in lines, little clay people, marching away with a gold tinsel star,

On the baptism of jesus they come back from afar
Pass the river Jordan
It never runs clear
Pass the brown river
We will come back here,
this says our Mary to her little Child dear



the baptism of the lord

Teach me the meaning of baptism
After I take off my clothes, naked as jesus here
I go under the water
white robed now I sit before an altar,
light a beeswax candle.
Love is the only incense here
help me be kind,
let me… forget
forego the evil, remember without rancor
oh, I am a saint here and
a saint is only a baby,
is only
trust


the end of this

You think you’ll come to the end of this
You won’t
You think you’ll wrap this truth around your waist
But no
You think you’ll reconcile this and that
You don’t
The truth will leave you with a sticky feeling revealing to an honest man that what is
Is not always what you want and
the difference between you and I is how one of us could never believe that that which was
Was what made you feel well until it no longer did
 
the blizzard of the whole damn world


This is the blizzard of the whole damn
world.
I put on boots at three a m and waded
through snow thick as waves.

Waves you were, waves you’ll be
and waves you shall become, and
your breath of crystal white washed my face at
three a m when the whole bright earth shone
like a second day time
and the river was a black and shining band.

look

I said, look at this
And you said, there is nothing to see.
We held the world in our hands and
you saw dirt and commented on the
greyness of the water.
I said, look, I see venus and there is mars
and you said, I never gave a damn about
stars, they never amazed me.
Ah, maybe God can try something
better next time.

that which saves

You said write, write and I said what
You said write, write
Set your sights on the white sky
I looked out my window to see the brick walls
of the courtyard and remembered looking was
just a metaphor,
I never looked out my window to see.
The wall and window, the desk and lamp said
see through me,
This is the cave of memory, merlin’s house, his crystal
cave is this very ordinary kitchen
Here we save, here we save, this is the cradle,
the womb, the grave, all of life, the earth,
water, sands, sits on this table
and spills from our hands.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top