--for Bradley Manning & Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
"And our lips are not our lips. But are the lips of heads of poets.
And should shout revolution."
--Jack Spicer
Anyone who makes us remember our naked animal beneath the
clothes is dangerous, thank you Bradley, thank you Mattilda. To remove the scandal of bare-assed nakedness
would require the annihilation of every bureaucratic agency sending memos
through our doors. It is 2012 and some
of us have positioned our boots in an attempt to hold back The Return To
Modesty Campaign. The American
homosexual of 2012 unapologetically celebrates surrendering to the dominant
culture for marital equilibrium and WAR! This swift, unmitigated return to wholesome
values acts like bookends many willingly throw themselves between. The
opportunity to challenge these stifling, life-threatening institutions passes
out of the conversation entirely in 2012.
Notes for the poem began with a meditation on meeting Marsha
P. Johnson in Thompson Square Park during the 1990 Gay Pride Festival. She started the 1969 Stonewall Riot, her
headfirst, unflinching fisticuffs with the police sited to this day by RuPaul
and others! She who started our revolution,
a tall black drag queen, carried a sign in 1990: STONEWALL WAS A RIOT NOT A TRADEMARK! “You are the coolest person I have ever met,”
I told her. “YES I AM,” she said with a
smile. “What does the P stand for in
your name?” “It means PAY IT NO MIND
baby, PAY IT NO MIND!” Where are the
statues, poems and operas in her honor?
She was homeless at the time she was murdered and thrown in the
Hudson. Our queen, our Mother of the
Revolution! She was the true deviant
propulsion, pushing the culture forward ready or not!
Marsha didn’t live to see faggots putting rainbow stickers
on machine guns to kill Arabs with impunity!
Faggots joining hands with a multi-billion dollar military industrial
complex should alarm us, infuriate us, it should break our hearts. Three children die of war-related injuries
EVERY SINGLE DAY in Afghanistan. And
after ten years of U.S. American occupation, Afghanistan has been deemed THE
MOST DANGEROUS nation on our planet for women.
How else can I repeat this so you hear it? U.S. America makes the lives of Afghan women
and children almost unendurable! GAY AND
LESBIAN U.S. AMERICANS HAVE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME!
Did you hear that?
The genocide of queer men in Iraq (called “puppies” instead
of “faggots” in Baghdad) is undoubtedly a direct result of the U.S. American
invasion and occupation of Iraq. The
most famous homosexual apologist for war Dan Choi helped make this genocide
possible while serving as a U.S. American soldier in Iraq. Destabilization of the secular Hussein
government has brought destruction to Iraqi queers. Our tortured, executed queer Iraqi brothers
have become merely another item on our long list of collateral damage.
Many notes, many notes for the poem, my sadness, my outrage,
my complete embarrassment for an assimilationist campaign gone mad! Then I did research on how to catheterize myself
to go out into the world with utter insertion.
I took notes, many notes for the poem.
I performed reiki on a long, thin piece of plastic tubing, reiki
imbuing the tube with my intentions to be in conversation throughout the day
about being queer. Queer. Today I will NOT ALLOW anyone to change the
subject when I talk about what it means to be queer. Today I will talk about the frustrations of
watching war go unquestioned by the U.S. American homosexual. Reiki.
I did reiki for half an hour on the plastic tube, then lubricated every
inch of it to ever so gently insert it into the irritated, angry looking opening
of my penis. It was not for pleasure of pain
it was for a chronic reminder of HOW the U.S. American culture inserts its will
on my cock more and more each day. You
may now be married under our rules. You
may now engage in mortal combat in designated enemy countries by our
rules. I had many strained, bizarre
conversations that day, constantly FEELING the plastic tube inside me while
walking around Philadelphia, while walking around Occupy Philadelphia and
talking about war, genocide and oil. The
following poem is the result of this writing ritual, which was more painful in
spirit than it was for the plastic plugging my urethra. After all, it’s much too late for careful.
