Jon Bell

Every loss leaves another hole.
A puncture in the outer shell, a knife
Wound that lifts another chunk of soul,
Pierces the safe illusion of my life.
Father, mother, son, brothers-in-love,
Living lovers lost to lies and shame,
Friends unfriended when push descends to shove,
Survival seems such a loser’s game.
But in time, I’m a leaf reduced to lace
A tracery with clarity of sight
And then it’s me and God, face to face.
Funny, how every hole lets in more light.
I’m being taught that we’re all one,
That I’m a drop of light in a flood of sun.

The poet (that’s me)

And his boss,

A business hotshot,

Meet a stumbling bum

On the sidewalk.

The poet and his boss

Are walking a short block

From the boss’s BMW to a client meeting.

Who knows where the rummy bum

Is headed, besides downhill?

His secret mission propels him toward us,

His pants held up by rope,

His shoes flapping

Like gnawing rats.

His eyes have melted into gummy wax.

“Ah-ha,” says the hoo-ha hotshot,

Armored in his Armani.

“Watch this.”

Leaning into the bum,

He sticks out his hand with this greeting:

“Hey buddy, can you spare some change?”

The poet’s boss poses with his hand extended,

Then throws back his head and roars.

His mockery scorches every ear.

It echoes everywhere, even down the years

To here.

The bum roars back:

Asshole, cocksucker,

Shithead, motherfucker.

He claims the street, rage-crazed Lear off stage.

The poet freezes,

Silent among this uproar

This uproarious laughter,

This outrageous rage.

The boss laughs down from his tower of privilege,

The bum climbs higher in his fury

And the poet freezes in between,

Neither rich nor poor,

Fearing success, expecting loss,

Neither drunk nor sober,

Drinking too much, beginning on the death march toward the bum,

But desperate to climb upward toward the boss.

And so we stood, picture perfect

My boss looking down on a lower drunk.

The drunk tremoring and towering in rage

Looking down on the boss,

Me looking down on the bum,

My looming future self,

And sneering up at my asshole aspiration.

All of us on our high horses

Galloping in all directions.

Judging up, judging down,

Judging all around the town.

Three judges in a circle jerk

All in a day’s work.

From this brief street scene

It’s just a short hop to the right

In your luxury sedan

To the St. Amnesius High School

Where you can play the man,

Chase down a gayboy,

Cut his hair against his will,

Enjoy the thrill,

Then forget it ever happened.

It’s all just teasing anyway

Nothing to make you queasy

Easy to shove from sight

So it won’t haunt your nights.

Other neighborhood landmarks

Include Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

Where you can hone your skills in enhanced teasing.

Geronimo!

Or follow the path of the drunk.

Go forward to the basement stairs

Of the Despairing Bear Bar and Grill

With its tab that quickly mounts to a lethal bill

And its famous one-way elevator,

All downhill.

Seriously, no one’s ever going to see you later.

Or just blunder along with the poet

And watch over the years

As he plays both boss and bum.

Scorning upward on a Tuesday

Sneering down on Thursday.

Now at a distance of some years

I see us all blurring on a carousel

Of judgment.

I am first the poet, then the boss,

Then the slurring drunk,

Then all at once I’m

All at once,

Each of us so cluttered up with junk

There is no space for grace.

Live in a poverty of spirit,

And every day is judgment day.

Each assigned to his separate cell

Each condemned to his private hell.

The walls I build to shut you out

Become the well that keeps me in.

What begins on superior highs

Devolves to a life of sin and lies.

Lord, I know I crafted this my cage

Out of iron bars of fear and rage.

But how, O Lord, can I get free

Unless you batter it and me?

I cannot free myself of me:

Me cannot free myself of I.

Me myself and I –

Unholy trinity till we die.

Lord, before you finally set me free,

Give me this day when you deliver me from me.

 

Have I ever seen a ghost?

A few years into our affair,

I found my lover

Wistful about a lost friend,

Some guy who had died

Several years before.

I asked to see a photo

And was shown a picture,

A faded shot,

Of a familiar face, as if

Of someone I had known some years ago,

A fellow student maybe,

Maybe my brother, another:

And then I saw

From years ago

A stranger, altered

Alter ego.

I knew those eyes.

Were they mine?

Were those my eyes

Staring back from this foggy mirror?

And the smile, the curve of the lip,

The line of the jaw,

OMG, c’est moi!

Who was my lover wrestling back

From the past

Through the darkness

When he held me?

Who was he calling

When he closed his eyes

And cried out?

As he recalled the virtues

Of his long-dead friend,

The room filled up with vanished love

And I retreated ever farther

Into fog and gloom.

Faded, misted, wispéd,

Desperate to stay,

I finally had to go away

To find the me

I used to be.

And so in obedience to the universal law,

I began to drift away.

Once a ghost knows he’s a ghost,

He cannot stay.

Do I believe in ghosts?

Hell, yes.

I’ve

fucking

been one

In the Kingdom of God

The hummingbird wears emeralds

As she offers her heart

To the falcon.

 

In the KofG

The snail traces a labyrinth

On the sidewalk.

Follow it with your eyes

Without blinking,

And it is the same as crawling to

The City of God

And back

On your knees.

 

In the KofG

Sunlight thick with gold

Butters the bricks across the alley.

It flows upward –

Honey defies gravity into the sky –

To meld with the sun that falls to meet it.

In the KofG

The goldfinch perches on the sunflower

To gorge on the swirling mandala

She herself creates.

 

In the KofG

The wet tap of heaven on my window

Is not the wet trap

That drives me inside for the day.

It is the song of the clouds made manifest.

 

In the KofG

My last breath is sweetened by

Kingly gifts:

Golden thankfulness and mirth.

My mother’s brother, the uncle I never knew,

Died in a bus wreck on June 24, 1946.

I was ten months old.

Survivors told how the bus

Was heading west on US 10, now Interstate 90,

Barely on the Seattle side of Snoqualmie Pass

When an eastbound black car swerved into the westbound lane,

And the bus driver swerved into the guard rail to avoid a crash,

Sending the entire Spokane Indians baseball team

Down the flanks of the mountain

And nine of its members to their deaths.

My mother’s brother, my Uncle Bob,

Was among the dead.

Eight of the nine, including Uncle Bob,

Had served in the armed forces

During World War II

And had been welcomed home just months before

Amid relief and jubilation and thanksgiving,

All of it now lost in flames and blood.

The black car continued on its way.

It was never found.

 

My mother’s father, Josiah Kinnaman, died two weeks later,

Of heartbreak or stroke or alcohol,

Leaving my mother without father and brother

And a yearlong season of anguish,

A calendar spattered with the black Xs of loss

From birthdays to death days

With no holidays from grief.

 

Only a few months later

I am a kid of three

On a brilliant spring morning,

So sunny and warm

My mother has hung the laundry out to dry

On clotheslines in the back yard.

The sheets are clouds that take the wind

In vast billows above my head.

I have fallen under their spell

And clutch them in my hands,

Marking them with the grubby smears of love.

I remember that perfect April sky

Only because of what came out of it:

My mother, diving through the bedsheet clouds.

My gentle mother transfigured into a warring angel,

Avenging her sullied sheets

In a doomed attempt to claim control

Over a tiniest bit of life,

Descending through clouds of outraged love

Brandishing, not a sword,

But a willow branch.

 

Suddenly through the billows the avenging angel dives

Aflame with the justice of a betrayed god.

Brandishing a sword, a willow switch

That awakens the boy from infant slumbers

Forever with a whirlwind of willow

Like a fallen angel aflame with rage,

Hurtling through wrath-white billows

Battling the grubby marks on the sun-sweetened sheets,

An angel at war, striking blind

At her baffling scars of rage and grief.

Leaving in her wake

A thin white scar on my inner thigh,

And a spring day bleached white with terror.

 

The white scar is still there.

 

The black car was never found.

 

For a lifetime, I’ve been haunted by

The fury coiled in the heart of the winter willow,

By a secret calendar of black Xs

Hidden from me and known only

By an unspeakable knowledge that springtime

Brings recurring days of high alert,

Nights swarming with black cars

Like bats flickering jet through ink,

Random meals of ash,

Afternoons pacing, watchful for the evil thing

That has already happened,

Already ripped through someone else’s past.

 

This is how terrorist grief hijacks immortality,

Leaping from mother to son, scar calling out to scar.

Grief, the bastard child of love,

Devours and grows and shits and breeds,

Coils into the DNA, replicates

And spins into life to feel like fate.

 

The black car was never found,

Hiding itself in the dark sheds

Of the hearts and brains

Of another home.

There it purrs away, spewing fumes,

The deadly secret,

The mystery that streams through the veins

Of generations,

The blood-warm toxin

Children don’t have to be warned against,

All of us born with secret reading skills:

Any kid can con

A secret that has already killed

And hums waiting to kill again.

 

A white moth flicks across the Christmas table,

A snowflake on a dead breath.

It chills the feast into silence

As it lands on the white cloth.

In the iced silence

It is snow on snow,

Visible only to the most naked eye.

 

The black car was never found.

In Memory of Zachary Dutro-Boggess, 2008-2012

 

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.

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 like 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.

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.

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 proportions.

Ned Rorem, Walt Whitman,

Herman Melville,

Auden, Cheever, Baldwin, Bernstein,

Benjamin Britten,

Tennessee Williams

Dag Hammarskjold,

Marlowe, Il Sodomo,

Michelangelo,

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, the immortal Other always reappears,

Everywhere 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.

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.

Birds from sparrows to hawks

Flock to the monk as he walks.

They chitter and squawk

At the man as he talks

Like woodland creatures

In Disney features.

They have no need to hear what he has to say.

They’re only there to show him the way

To the heaven he’s already standing in.

Shut up, Frank, and listen.

I am an old man reading a young man’s book.

It’s a pretty good novel about an old man.

Every paragraph sounds old and wise,

But it is not.

It’s the work of a young man

Trying to sound wise,

Which won’t work

Because real wisdom is not an act of will,

But a gift you get that can easily cost you your life.

 

The next morning you wake up

And realize you must have been a fool

To pay so high a price.

I:  Slaughter

Always the tidy start –

An alley walk

A short stalk

The lingering dream

Of a still,

Clean kill,

The neat click

Clack of my heels.

How sweet it feels.

I just wish

After the first

Thick swallow

I could re-train

Restrain

Before the frenzy unleashes

The demon blood-lust

And I descend

Into a blood-gush

Wallow.

 

II: Sonnet: Vampire Love                                                 

Sorry to text like this. I could be wrong,

But I get a vibe I’ve never felt before.

Even though I haven’t known you long

Nothing melts this straight dude’s core

Like those mesmerizing eyes.

It’s like you’re in my pulse, a throb, a beat.

Gotta ask. What workout made those thighs?

What supplements do you drink and eat?

It’s getting worse. I’m prone to verse

And a pounding kind of headache, heartache

Consumes my nights in a fevered wetdream curse.

I invite you in. I’m yours to take.

You want it too. I’ve seen you cruise me.

Fuck it man, don’t wait. Just juice me.

 

III: Night Garden

Bony twigs rattle in the nightwind,

The streetlight flickers twice.

A darkness gathers in darkness.

The heart feels a touch of ice.

 

Did a shadow shift in the garden?

Over there behind the shed

There’s a blacker shade of nothing

And a glint of ruby red.

 

Listen. The night is suddenly quiet.

The streets sound muffled, dead.

All you can hear is the pulse

Pulse, pulse of a creeping, beating dread.

 

A sudden wrinkle in night’s satin,

A spear like lust that thrusts to the core,

Then a thunder of invisible wings

And you’re lost in a feeding that always wants more.

 

A sharp pain, a sick faint, a fade,

The buckle of knees and melt of spine,

It has you. You give it your all.

You have one last crazy thought, “You’re mine.”

 

Bony twigs rattle in the nightwind,

The streetlight flickers twice.

A darkness gathers in darkness.

And a heart has turned to ice.

 

IV:  Power Drain

Congratulations on your promotion.

The title fits like your Savile Row suit.

Alone in your executive suite,

Your shoulders seem broader,

Your grin brighter, a little smug,

Your eyes are pinpoint cruel

Awash in the power-drug.

I’ve been following your scent through the city

Falling in love with your sleek silk tie

And well-marbled throat.

I know you’ve sensed me right behind you,

When you look over your shoulder

In the darkling parking garage

I’m what you are looking for.

I’m the sudden chill in the air,

The unexplained whiff of corruption,

I’m the fate that’s on your trail

I never fail

I’m here, my friend,

As close as the curtain behind your chair,

But you won’t see me till I’m ready.

You’re almost perfectly my type,

Just getting ready to rot,

Loving your own hype

I’m only waiting for you

To

Get

Ripe.

Sometimes at night I listen to you breathe,

One, two, one two, one

 

Two

And into that apnaeic gap

A wind rushes in smelling of the void

And autumn mold –

An icepack on my swollen heart.

 

You’ve come into my life

Necessary as breath.

You have not been diverted by my lovely wall,

Or taken in by my splendid show of words.

 

Oh no, you just keep coming and coming

And now see clearly into the dark and depths

Of need and broken boy

And deeper still touch the joy.

 

On the morning the world ends,

I trust you will be brave,

And take my breath away

As you always have.