Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Coming out at last May 8, 2013

  



 

Far and away, this is her most controversial poem, shocking in its admissions, even after a whole year reading her other poems.

I’m not going to say this poem vindicates my early reactions to her – because the poem is far more than just an admission, it is a testimony to new found freedom and an outpouring of relief that should not be judged by any outsider, especially me.

For this reason, I am going to do my best to refrain from editorializing and do as straight an analysis as possible, letting her own words explain her logic – which may or many not fit with my sometimes too straight morality.

(It would be unfair – if I can use that word in this contest – to pass judgement, especially at time has largely proved my previous judgments wrong.)

Oddly enough, as shocking a poem as this is, it is not an indictment or a confession, but a celebration, an coming out in poetry that she has largely resisted in the past. Previous poems like the one about trickling up or even about changed priorities hid behind complicated metaphors that only the savvy could unencrypt. There is very little encryption here.

She opens the poem telling about a woman she spent an hour with “Who made my everyday reprise of wantonness and regret a breeze,” she writes.

The implication is that she has lived her life to this point feeling guilty about her “wantonness,” a word that describes lascivious and other excessive behavior, especially in regard to sex.

Who this woman is, she does not say. I might be her drinking buddy from our office, but possibly not.

 The poem calls this woman “a seed of change,” blown in on some breeze and grew into a rare flower” that turned into reality and stopped our poet’s constant self-reprisals – this rare and wanton flower reminding the poet that “fair” and “unfair” are just words, “not the way things are.”

The poet refers to this flower as a pure spirit, a miracle that jolts the poet out of her “older, time-worn ways” and into liberation.

The world does not revolve around guilt and perpetual penance, nor does life follow the prescribed rules of merit in which talented people who work hard will succeed and get their just rewards. There is no karmic light around the concept of “doing the right thing.”

“This is wrong,” she writes.

The key to happiness is not to base your worth on “right and wrong,” “fair or unfair,” which ties you to a kind of life that makes you bleed while you sit patiently waiting to serve.

“Life is, it is simple,” she writes.

In other words, if you buy into the bullshit people tell you about doing the right thing then you’ve waited the beauty of what is.

The idea is to live life without regret or guilt, and not to try to make it make sense.

Essentially, the poem says do whatever it takes to make yourself happy and do not bind yourself with outmoded morality that only brings you guilt and pain.

This is a poem of liberation, the culmination of a number of poems over the last month that seem to be building to this idea of an unfair world and that by obeying rules you are holding yourself back – and if you are made unhappy by obeying other people’s rules, then to hell with the rules.

The shocking aspect of the poem is the fact that she finally opens up about things she previously kept quiet or disguised in complicated poetic metaphor, alluding to a robust sexual life style and her ambitions for advancement as she struggled with resulting guilt.

The joyous tone of the poem comes from her throwing caution to the wind and proclaiming in a loud voice she won’t be ashamed any more of doing things that make her happy.

In some ways, this is a lot like a long-closeted gay finally coming out, no longer having to live with guilt and fear.

And as shocking as it is to read how openly she professes her life style (and how shocked I would have been and was a year ago by it all), the poem is a declaration of independence, and at the same time, defuses everything her enemies might use to discredit her.

 

   2012 menu 



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Waiting for the vibration April 9, 2012

 


My phone vibrates

Under my pillow

Like a sex toy,

Making me react

The same way

I know who is

On the other end

Of thee line,

A spirt that

Haunts me

Every night,

Like a wet dream

Seducing me

Even when it’s

Only text,

I see her lips move

In each pic she posts,

Or recall her

From across the table

At the office,

Her deep eyes

Looking at me,

Then away,

Teasing,

While we both pretend

We’re not even there,

The vibration

Of my vibrating phone

Stirring me down
to the bones,

Though worse

Is when the phone

Doesn’t,

And I cling to it

Breathless in

Anticipation,

Rocked awake

When it finally

Comes,

If not always

When I want it to,

Or expect it,

A ghost who when

She does,

Soothes me off to sleep

And into the deep

Dreams

Of pure delight.

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Mine eyes still glints March 4, 2025

 

Mine eye still glints when I think of thee, thy heavenly brow, thy upturned nose, the mouth whose lips I still ache to kiss, a kiss that lingers in memory, like an echo that never expires, only fades, dimmed by time, but not by desire,

Mine eyes glint when I recall they eyes, the reflection of a reflection, brown pools into which I dive head first, a reckless act, to become so emersed as to forget I exist, separate from then, thine touch like a scalding want, under they spell I remain, mine eyes still sees what it’s seen before, the memory of a memory, a stone casts into the depths of a pool, leaving ring up on rich until I do not recall how deep I am until too late.


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Swimming in quick sand Friday, August 03, 2012

 


You can’t force someone to be your friend.
The more you try, the more they hate you, especially when they dislike you to start with.
In all this, there was never any middle ground, always all or nothing, and I wanted to stand some place in this that wasn’t so deep that I always felt like I was over my head, drowning all the time.
In the end, as the poem goes, I was swimming in quicksand, where there is never any middle ground, just oblivious.
I don’t even know why all this bothers me so much, why I need or desire someone else’s good opinion and friendship that I would risk my life to retain it, clinging to sheds of hope that it might be possible long after it clearly wasn’t.
People like me never get the message until someone puts a gun to my head and says: “Get it now?”
A friend asked how I feel now that I have capitulated. I said, like a wind up alarm clock that had been over wound for so long I’m not unsprung.
The inevitable, of course, is the long humbled walk away, back bend, utterly defeated, knowing that I will always have this gun to my head, always give in to whatever demand is made, losing dignity as well as the illusion of friendship.

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Cub to old saw April 20, 2012

 


I can't believe she went from

cub reporter to old saw so fast,

 wise enough to teach the public

 about what she does,

 computer screen with

the company website

and ragged-edged print copies

 with her byline under each tale,

 she telling me she needed me

to be there to give her confidence

 when in truth, she does all right on her own,

 so used to being up there

on stage  that is not a stage

 I feel as if I am the cub reporter

she once claimed herself to be,

more a witness or the shill

old time vaudeville performers salted

the audience with,

expected to laugh or clap

 at the appropriate moment

 so that the rest of her audience

might pick up on the cue,

 though in fact,

I need a wink or a nod to tell me

when to laugh or clap

and a score card to figure out

 if I've done it all right.

 


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Of all the gin joints May 2012


 
Two days after I recall it all,

 embroidered in my brain like a bad tattoo,

 never to get removed,

had I wanted to,

where she/we/they sat and

the crispness of the bar,

the bartender,

 and the couple from God knows where

 seated side by side with us,

the same place we came once before,

 later, darker, inside rather than out,

not Paris, although she wore blue,

maybe the couple from Eastern Europe,

we, from just up the block,

the eerie sense of Deja Vu

as if I should have known

 what would come to pass,

how I acted already drunk,

 like a giddy bride,

a birthday boy,

a bumbling idiot with card and candy

 she thought I was crazy to bring

 since this was my belated

birthday bash not hers,

 destined to become a disappointment,

 all of the gin joints etc,

and yet, I felt like Rick

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Monday, July 14, 2025

oozing March 3, 2025

The warm oil oozing out from between my fingers and onto her bare shoulder, feeling like silk, the touch of flesh as I press easing something inside of me I didn’t know I needed easing, and from the moans I hear, easing something inside her as well, touching and being touched, the warm oil cooling yet never cool, oozing into the pores of her back, and fingers until I become what I touch, my flesh blending with her flesh with each slow stroke, no friction, just the movement, the up and down, the slow round and round, while I imagine how it all would feel, also the in and out, me oozing into her until we both feel like silk, drawn deeper and deeper inside.



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