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I was sent by God

To test your lovingkindness.

Jesus is not pleased.

The grass is always

Diamond-dazzle white

Or wet with emeralds.

The great blank sky

Stares back in blue.

 

Inside, the quilt smells like whining,

And me, the boy who naps in sweet and salt.

A bowl of daffodils shouts yellow

Against a wall of grief.

The dog lifts her golden head

Because she knows her boy

Has excess love to give.

 

Real men have stripped this land,

Drilled mudroads deeply into firs.

The hills are finally cleared of ash and alder,

Other trash trees,

First trash peoples.

 

It’s all mine, I know,

Unless I blow my cover

Unless they discover

This queerness at my core.

I’m one limp wrist from becoming

The white man’s error apparent.

I can be vanished, too.

 

What doors have I had to lock

To block that blank?

So easy to slam a door,

To keep the calendar from flipping back.

But so much is lost if I lose the hills.

I have to hang onto the diamonds, the emeralds,

The stinging spring stink of daffodils.

 

My work is just as hard as those

Who cleared and killed and logged.

I’m the heir who must perform

Two brutal chores.

Take out the garbage. Let in the dog.

Slog through it when you’re 25.

Set aside to rest, like bread dough. Go about your business.

Maybe join the army. Fall in love.

Get a job, build a career.

Get married, have children.

Tell some whopping, unbelievable lies.

Bury a parent, sibling or friend.

Get caught in your whopping, unbelievable lies.

Catch a glimpse of yourself

In a storefront window. Repent.

Start fresh. Quit your job. Fall in love.

Get seriously sick. Bury another parent, sibling or friend.

Re-read Mansfield Park.

Rinse and repeat, as time allows.

While the planet burns,

You fiddle with my Gay dick.

You’re our new Nero.

In Memory of Zachary Dutro-Boggess, 2008-2012

I. Kyrie

Don’t look away. Don’t miss

What God left here for you to see. Just this:

This mess of sticks and blood and rags

That spews slurping tidal gags

When the soul has rushed out but the body lingers

In cracking lungs and curling fingers.

Here in the middle of the homeless shelter

This fragile puppet, broken toy

Was a boy.

Now empty as a beachball

With the air crushed out.
If you look away

Your eyes will be useless glass.

Your brain already dead,

Your heart

Dried and hard as brick.

And this mess of sticks and blood

Will be nothing more than a wet doll

Left on the floor of an empty house.

No, for your own sake,

Don’t look away.

II. Agnus Dei

This bloodied toy

Was a small boy

Named Zach,

Kicked by mom’s boyfriend,

Beaten by his mother

Until dead,

Because, she said,

Or rather texted,

Because he looked so queer.

“He walks like them,

He talks like them,”

She tweeted. “Ugh.”

That was a four-year-old’s

Sentence of death.

Of course she was right.

A mother knows these things.

You were a fairy-child,

Who bounced and flounced,

Twirled like a girl,

Lisped limp-wristed through the tortured days

Before your mother

Couldn’t bear the shame

And all that’s left is your name.

You died of shame spit-shined and polished, Zach.

Not your shame. None was yours.

All hers.

In shame she chose a name

That was already an attack:

Zach. ZACH. ZACH. ZACH!

Oh, Zach.

Beyond the family nest,

You were the collateral cost

In the war on queers,

Part of the time-honored

Slo-mo

Homo

Holocaust.

III. Credo

Zach, I wish I had my colleague’s power

To write you into eternal life,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

But in sooth,

Poetry is piss-poor life support.

Just check the report

That Shakespeare filed.

His beautiful friend

Still met his end

And all that lovely love and lust

Crumbled into dust

As we all must.

But words are all I have

To call you back.

Whatever magic lives in your name

Cannot relight a flame

Gone cold.

No matter how long I call for Zach,

Zach, Zach, Zach, Zach

How I long to call you back,

I lack the power.

No one can call you back.

IV. Gloria

We’ll never know what’s been lost.

A Tchaikovsky, Nijinsky or DaVinci,

Noël Coward, E.M. Forster or Cole Porter,

A wartime hero like Alan Turing,

Acclaimed by queen and nation

Then rewarded with chemical castration.

Alexander the Macedonian

Leader of armies, bedder of men,

Chief among them Hephaestion.

Hadrian and his Antinous,

Enkidu and Gilgamesh,

Achilles and Patroclus.

All loves of epic, Homeric immensity.

Ned Rorem, Walt Whitman,

Herman Melville,

Auden, Cheever, Baldwin, Bernstein,

Benjamin Britten,

Tennessee Williams,

Dag Hammarskjold,

Marlowe, Il Sodomo,

Michelangelo,

Frederico García Lorca,

At least four lionhearts of England,

Including Queen James of Bible fame.

Sondheim, Jean Genet,

Oscar Wilde,

Thornton Wilder,

Billy even Wilder

Harvey Milk and Larry Kramer.

Isherwood, Bachardy,

RuPaul, Capote and Byzantine Cavafy.

Not to mention William Shakespeare,

Who crackles electric queer in my ear.

The list of secret names is much longer –

I could have named them

If the closet had not claimed them.

Maybe you would have survived –

Thrived –

Among the schoolyard bullies and their taunts

To fly high in history

At the side of Sally Ride

To become our first sissy astronaut.

Proving one mother’s zero

Is another man’s hero.

Or would you be

Just another me?

Heart-scarred

With wounds so hard

To heal

It takes three score years and ten

To learn to love again.

In my dictionary of queer

Every word rhymed with fear.

V. Sanctus

And yet,

When it comes to love,

God has the patience of a Job,

For those not too proud to learn.

So while I indulged my self-inflicted crimes,

Afflictions and addictions,

God presented me the gift of time.

The point is this:

Our other brothers and our sisters,

In all times, all places,

Have already earned their seats,

Your seat, my seat,

At the grown-ups’ feast.

All we need do now,

The least we can to honor you

And all our martyred kindred,

Is take a seat and eat.

But what shall we do with your mother?

The love you feel for her is real,

Along with the bewilderment and fear.

Can we forgive her

For your sake?

That’s a Himalayan leap.

We can start with a smaller step

And remember she did not act alone.

VI. Dies Irae

It takes a village to kill a little boy.

A mother. A boyfriend.

Grandparents with the skill and age

To distill, instill, install the rage.

An extended family that hates itself.

Aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces

To forge their hatred into jagged shrapnel

Tooled to shred the soul.

Among them, they also kill who only look away.

Plus thousands of onward marching preachers,

Plus whole schoolyards of little kids

The front-line ranks of scornful screechers

Recruited and stationed to purify the nation

To scourge the vermin

From among the “pure”.

They also kill who only clap and cheer.

A phalanx of teachers just to nod with pride.

They also kill who only turn aside.

A campaign of shame

Requires boots on ground

Once the target’s found

To break the ribs,

Rupture the spleen

Break apart

And take apart the heart.

Italian leather is the best.

Polished by toiling male virgins

With holy-moly oils,

To a greasy shine.

Italian leather has survived the test

Of time – days, weeks, centuries, hours –

With proven magic powers:

The shit and tears and blood of children

All wash off.

No trace remains,

No tell-tale stains.

The evidence of a thousand years

Is empirical.

It’s a god damned miracle!

Who owns the greater blame?

The heart that welcomes murder in?

Or the one who preaches sin?

Do not grieve for your mother.

She is in a double prison

Stays within her cell

Imprisoned in her self

A single cell,

A double hell

To which she herself holds the key

Held tight within her heart.

She will be free

The moment she discovers it

And finds her love for you again.

Only she can turn the key

And get free.

VII. Libera Me

Meanwhile, the immortal Other always reappears,

Every when and every here.

An endless army of infant queers,

Born into every time and age,

Some like Zach born to grief

And the briefest pirouette across the stage.

We will always reappear.

We’re the miracle

Spiraling unexplained

Out of the DNA:

The red tulip in the field of white

Neither wrong nor right

But equally precious in God’s sight.

It takes a village to commemorate

Such a child,

To light the birthday candle

And recite a death-day prayer.

To not look away in horror

From the broken puppet

On the bloody floor.

It takes a village

To honor this exactly Zach

And all his broken brethren

To pray for all their mothers and their fathers.

And the teachers and the preachers

Who see evil everywhere except at home,

In every heart except their own.

If I could, I’d sing you back,

Back to a loving home,

Sweet Zach, broken Zach.

And if I cannot sing you back to love,

I can at least remember you,

And in so doing

Invite the world that declared you wrong

To join me in a thanksgiving song.

You nudged us all forward

One eighth of one quarter

Of a fraction of an inch.

Take pride, infant warrior,

Fallen hero.

That’s all any of us can do.

VIII. In Paradisum

We’re here to sing you to a better sleep

Enveloped in our arms.

Words were the first weapons honed to kill you,

Words can be used to right each wrong

Words can weave a spell

To welcome you if you come back,

And if not you, then greet

The next sweet fairy Zach.

Safe at last in the eternal family

Where it’s not too late

To forgive all hate

With our God who loves us all

Gay and straight

Lesbian, queer, transgendered

The murderers and their murdered,

Safely harbored, recalled,

Each intermingling with each

In a separate, universal peace

As vast as thought and time.

Cradled in remembrance here,

Safe forever from all harms

Cradled here and in God’s arms.

Breathe in. Breathe out. In and out. Don’t think.

Forget your desperate search for bliss.

Forget every cell screams for drink.

Try harder. Bliss sure ain’t this.

Make the spinning neurons stop

Brooding over Facebook, emails, faxes.

Call out your mental traffic cop.

Inhale the blank. Exhale banks and taxes.

Move heaven and earth to find mindful poise.

Feast on silence till you’ve had your fill.

A paltry feast. Your brain’s abuzz with noise.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Dial up your will.

Don’t think of the power of his golden thighs,

Or the golden mysteries of his eyes.

Raphy Nicholas Bell, September 20 – October 7, 1981

A lifetime later,

I sit at my desk

And the light in the water glass

Catches my eye.

All I want to do

Is write a poem

To keep the light

Catch the light

Caught by the water

As it plays in the glass on the desk.

Glances. Goes.

Where does light go

When I can’t see it?

That flicker of li li ofli

That flick light

Flick

Light flicker

That

Was you

There once was a man from Tacoma,
Who gave off a pleasant aroma.
He hooked up with a gent
With a similar scent,
Until he died of a malignant sarcoma.

Consider my dick. At three score years and ten,

It still stands tall to defy its age.

It’s habitually shy – till now – when

It’s been thrust upon the national stage.

From what I hear I can use this magic rod

To pry up love, destroy whole families,

Magic away your faith in almighty God

And bring a global empire to its knees.

Look on my dick, ye mighty, and despair.

It’s not alone. Millions will appear

Born out of God’s genetic air,

Year after year, feeding your sad fear.

The Eternal Queer is everywhen and where.

Look on my dick, bitch, and despair.

Born with more handicaps than a pretty gayboy

From Red Neck, Oregon,

You started life blind and black

And crippled with a joint disease

That should have kept you mewling in a back room

Till death dragged you out.

Instead, you defied borders and boundaries,

Restrictions and constrictions,

Transported by spirit from Perth to Perth

Circling the globe

To circumambulate us all.

 

Always one step ahead of me,

You get off the escalator

A heartbeat before I do

Wait for me,

Hold out your hand

And laugh.

On my old man days,

When everything hurts,

My head, my back, my feet, my spleen,

The bleeding calendar, the weather,

The rotten rose on the October stem,

On those days, slipping into something new

Where I will be with you in the dark light,

Is the final calm after so many storms.

Now as I get ready to go into the dark myself,

Help me to remember:

Death is just a farther Europe

That you got to first.