Brer

(“To have lived is not enough for them; they have to talk about it.”)

My card-carrying Gemini and I
slipping between the speeds of life
and the meager production of each day.
The locks on his hair,
the chains on his clothes,
the kinds of things measured by trauma.
All bound, wrapped and burned just after I
pushed him away, then returned.
The man seeking catholicity without religion,
who sees collars instead of careers
and hearses instead of station wagons.

The trickle-down theory of art has now
put Warhol on Billy Squire albums
and the Clash in the top ten.
So we dig deeper, run farther,
and leave old music behind, crying.
The paparazzi just stares, sits on
new piles of records, waiting for
new things to be advertised on the radio.

The brethren we ignore,
random peers that are thrown at us.
Like lions to Christians,
photographs to faces,
sheets to people on parade.

Watch the sun slash the backs of the
ones too sore to turn over.
Catch their broken laughter tinted with pearls
of fear, and pour it back
into bottles of Rainier.
These lives that benefit the small trains
of satisfaction. The routes they run;
the punctual schedules they keep.
With the margins of life that get cut and pasted
around bulletin boards.
But, today the magazine of dreams will gun down
the dreams of reality,
with the likeliness of __________ at its heels.

We-
We have all we can carry
with St. Christopher beating on steel drums
at the back of the caravan.
Students at the front,
gods at the back,
existential terrorists pulling up the flank.
With two-point border tape and
a cutline that says “Rat Patrol Reggae.”

Not a waste land to be found,
except for the newly raped beaches that force the horizon into
a half-nelson.
French-cut tee-shirts evolve into guerrilla tank tops.
How to spin canteens out of hay?

The warriors of the mind
stormtrooping through galleries
clutching subpoenas for the bourgeoisie
and cackling.
Satire as inflammatory as
poems placing poets as pets on pedestals
for inventing new routines.
Being private = being public

Daring to be different
daring to be the same;
as long as it’s daring.

From the time you said we rebelled together
to the year we finally painted our niche.
And how the arrows whispered “go linear”
with eggs and darts just beneath the soundtrack.
Hear the images of the twin poets combine
on the Xeroxes of art school legends.
Get Bauhaus in here, too, to shoot our gatefold spread.

From the corners of suburbia,
decorated with walls and ceilings
(a real barren baron’s barbecue)
comes a poem about us.
The kind that you read twice,
then save for six months hoping
you’ll understand it later.
The two of us who would only sleep
on park benches to raise our level of consciousness,
and push the letters of our names with
the typewriter turned off.

But, style that’s loosely based on life?
Ars gratia artis?
Can we give each other these things,
like handfuls of frets,
reams of kissed paper,
electricity electricity electricity.

Just be with me as we run.
(As we’re chased, as we race.)
We’ll catch the colors that gallop, and
steer straight through the crowds.
The dissonance,
the chameleons,
the deliberate pace to keep turning the page.

Our god,
whom art within us,
and the lines we sketch escaping it,
forming shaping destroying burying—
watch it sprint.

O bless the artists and the groupies
our shaved off gender and sagging thoughts
lifted by ourselves.
Forgive us, we know what we forget.

— February 14, 1983

The epithet is from “Waiting for Godot”

I wrote this for David, whom I met when we were in second grade and was my best and closest friend all through school until we went to different colleges. Two years later he transferred to WWU and we met up again. A good year and a half before he came to Western I wrote this poem for him to let him know how much I valued his friendship and to illustrate what we’d been through together. A year later he came out of the closet, something which really didn’t matter to me, but which ended up being cataclysmic for him psychologically, and for some reason it changed the dynamic of our friendship and we eventually drifted apart.

All the time I was growing up I was called a fag by the other boys for various reasons, such as I preferred to write and draw rather than play sports and work on cars, and because I enjoyed and preferred the company of girls (especially since all the other boys did was taunt me mercilessly anyway), yet was too shy and too psychologically and intellectually complex to have any girlfriends whom I thought understood me. I’ve always thought that having an English family yet being raised in the States forced my mind to work more than someone who was indigenous to their own culture because I was constantly having to translate between the two cultures in order to understand both my family and my peers. England and America are two completely different places with only the language in common, and you can’t even say that really…maybe the words, but not the language. I think I ended up becoming a writer because I was constantly misunderstood when I was growing up and sought to eradicate any misunderstanding by learning how to use words as well as I could.

David’s father’s family was British as well, so he and I were both estranged from our peers in the same way, yet we both recognized that we each shared the same aesthetic sense as well as similar intellectual and psychological traits and would frequently read very weighty material voraciously (for our ages), but rarely the same books: He read Music For Chameleons and Junky while I was reading Atlas Shrugged and the Autobiography of Malcolm X; he was reading The Satanic Bible while I was reading Four Quartets. Even our musical tastes were different. He loved Led Zeppelin, I loved The Who. And that was always the strangest thing: our minds were of the same caliber, yet we very rarely agreed on anything, even though we both knew that we really had no better friend to discuss things with as deeply as we did. But David discovered drugs many years before I did and eventually I ended up not being able to relate to him on many different levels. I once told him (and a couple of female friends at school) that if he were female I’d want to marry him, but the implication was not intended that I desired his body, but in fact that if I could find a female with a mind like his she would mean everything in the world to me.

I’ve never had an erotic thought for another male in my life, even though I very early developed a lot of sympathy and empathy for homosexuals because I had been called a fag myself for so long all throughout my youth. I even ended up writing a lengthy article about gays in the military for the campus newspaper at WWU, which was as much an exercise in empathy for me as it was a way to help gay issues get into the mainstream campus newspaper in the early 80s. I felt so estranged from the other little boys when I was growing up that when I *would* find a friend the thought of them leaving me terrified me so much that I always tried to let him know how much his friendship meant to me, in kind of a conspiratorially comradeship way. Because I didn’t have many friends I learned to *love* them, and at that age when suddenly we become sexual beings I quickly found that spiritual love wasn’t enough anymore, in fact it was all too much and my attention was seen as suspect. And that, of course, is the age when love would soon be replaced by initiation rites into manhood, where it would be a gradually escalating series of hazing rites to prove one’s worth to the other boys. I got picked on so much, yet still tried to fit in so much, that I soon found that nothing I ever did was enough to stop the other boys from taunting me and finally I just gave up and turned to my books and girls for solace. (And it wasn’t until I heard The Wall by Pink Floyd, which was released when I was 15, that I suddenly realized I did indeed have a psychological wall around me, and I quickly tried to take it down brick by brick which took quite a few years to do.) As a result I was granted more access to girls because I learned how to communicate with them much more regularly and much more platonically than most of my peers, yet put my reputation with other boys in peril and soon enough was called a fag because even though I kept the company of girls I wasn’t playing doctor with them. I did play doctor once with another girl in the neighborhood when I was very small, but we were caught literally with our pants down in the garage by my grandmother which was enough of a psychic trauma (not to mention the ensuing event of having my parents find out) to never do it again.

Anyway, I wrote “Brer” when I was the arts editor for the Western Front campus newspaper and realized that we were going to be having an issue coming out on Valentines Day, my birthday, so I decided to put this poem on the last page of the Arts section which was also the back page of the issue itself. Therefore, there was a 50-50 chance that when the students saw the new issue they would either first see the headlines on the front page or my poem. Although he never said it to my face, I heard that Mitch, our managing editor at the time, was very disappointed with me for putting a poem on the back page. (Of course, he also was quoted one day as saying that football was better than sex.) The night we put the paper to bed I remember walking back to my dorm room at 1 or 2 in the morning and stopping to sit down on the curb of the street that ran straight through campus and suddenly I realized that I was 19 years of age. And as I turned my head looking both ways up and down the empty street I laughed to myself at the fact that in the morning the entire campus would see on the back page of the Western Front a poem I wrote for a male friend that spoke of fraternal love, not homosexual love, and I thought to myself: “I can do anything.” One of the most joyous feelings I’ve ever had and something I’ve always been very proud of.