for Jo Mariner
“We’ve got to deal with the fact that the
church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We’ve murdered them; we’ve burned them at the
stake; we’ve run them out of town for something over which they have no
control. And that’s immoral.”
The Book of Romans by the apostle Paul is
very popular in the United States among Christian extremists who justify
genocide of queers. “Even their women
exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned
natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men,
and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."
The Book of Romans is 9 pages long and for 9
days I would sing a page, then shout it, feeling the trauma this book used to condone
violence against queer women and men. Then
I would chop the page into a blender, add a little crystal infused water and
pulverize it to a wad of pulp. I would
take notes for the poem, then fill a gel suppository with the page, add
lubricant and insert it past my sphincter and deep into my asshole. “It is me surrounding you now, time to meet
your ghosts,” I would say and go into town ringing a bell and chanting the names
of some of homophobia’s victims. Like my
friend Jim McCormick who said he would rather kill himself than let his family
find out he had AIDS, and then he did it.
Erika Keels who was run over by a transphobic man in Philadelphia. The list of names filled the 9 days with a
shower of unrelenting blood: Skye
Mockabee, Amos Beede, Maya Young, Matthew Shepard, Kimberly Morris, Amanda
Alvear, Kayden Clarke, and many others.
All my life Christian extremist politicians
have used their homophobia to garner respect for their political
campaigns. Religious extremism from
positions of authority and their influence over the actions of their
constituency is obvious in a world of confident bullies. From 2016 to 2017 US lawmakers submitted over
200 anti LGBTQ bills to become laws. I
sat on a bench outside the courthouse to end this ritual each day, leaning
forward, then back, then side to side to feel the page of the bible up inside
me, apostle Paul deep-fingering me as I read printouts of some of these
laws. In the state of Mississippi a law
to allow any person or business to deny service to same-sex couples for
religious objections. Arizona, Indiana,
North Carolina, an ambitious stream of hateful anti LGBTQ bills issued with
some of them sticking and becoming laws.
In Tennessee a law that allows doctors to refuse treatment of queers
without legal repercussions for instance.
I would take more notes for the resulting 9 untitled poems, reminding
myself of the words of the great poet Audre Lorde who said, “It is not our
differences that divide us. It is our
inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” I tire of these inabilities. I will now shit out the cause. I will continue to Love this world despite
the oppositions to do so.
