David Groff
Alan, Undetectable, Dead at 54:
I hated Mahler’s 10th, channeled to completion
by some presumptuous hack.
What a miserable 40th you gave me,
attending me, my broken mirror,
tuneless beside me as they revived
the Beethoven-haunted master
who couldn’t bring himself
to surpass the genuine master and die.
Over my final decades I
stopped making music
or hearing it really,
indignant as I was at surviving,
my fingers troubled with nicotine,
cocaine. That night in Carnegie Hall
you were of little assistance
and now you have the nerve
to finish my sentence.
I am no Mahler but
no one will recall your
nearly rhymeless lines
though you did pick up the birthday dinner.
I ate a full plate of food that night.
David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House Press, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002), a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle awards for gay poetry. He has co-edited three anthologies: Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), with Jim Elledge; Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010), with Philip Clark; and Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996) with Richard Berman. He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood (Houghton Mifflin/The University of Minnesota Press, 1999) for its author, the late Robin Hardy. Groff teaches in the graduate creative writing program at City College, CUNY.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Write a persona poem in the voice of someone with HIV. In today’s poem, the speaker, a person with HIV, happens to be dead, but that does not have to be the case in your poem. Moreover, the speaker can be completely imaginary, or you can write in the voice of an actual HIV-positive person (you just want to be careful about confidentiality if the person is not public about their HIV status). NOTE: This prompt is similar to the one for April 10, but in that case, the suggestion was to write a persona poem about a person receiving a positive HIV test result; here, we broaden the scope to living with HIV.