Poems Found in Notebooks #4
Before you say a word — December 1991
This series features first drafts of poems found in my notebooks and journals that go back to the 1980s. Each poem in this series will be accompanied by some notes—memoir, context, craft, etc. As you read, bear in mind that the text is a largely unedited draft lifted right out of a notebook—This series is more about process than perfection. Enjoy!
Before you say a word, I am yours. Don't ruin it— Take without asking. Don’t explore, Don’t discover. Make use. Make me do it. You don't want to know; It’s all too much and not enough— It's all wrong. *** You had much to recommend you. I served you well, and you Showed your appreciation; Just enough to hint At tenderness, Some depth of feeling, Some insight; Just within the bounds, Just this side of persona, And short of self. *** How adept we are at finding One another, You who will take so eagerly What I give so easily And so well, I who can swallow your persona To the hilt, and taste nothing Of your self.
Notes
Like many of us, I wrote poetry as a schoolboy, sometimes as a classroom activity, sometimes as homework, sometimes because I was that kid. But this was the first poem I ever wrote as an adult. What I like to call my first grown-ass poem. And as you can see…it’s terrible!
I don’t really mean that. Fact is, I love this poem. Remember, what you see here is the absolute first draft, just as I jotted it down in a notebook in December 1991, when I was 30 years old, and had a year before tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. There was no cure. There was one treatment—AZT—that many people said was “worse than the disease.” In 1991, HIV infection was quite literally a death sentence.
If you have been reading Beachcomber Mike these past few months, you probably don’t need me to tell you that this is a poem about anonymous gay sex in a public setting. Welcome (back) to my 1990s. But this is not just another poem about anonymous gay sex—This is the very first one. And in fact, to a meaningful extent, anonymous gay sex in public settings was the very reason I started writing poetry.
I started out as a fiction writer. From the very beginning, my stories were homoerotic adventures. And I do mean the very beginning. When I was 12, I wrote a science-fiction story called “The Best of Enemies,” in which a soldier from the rebellious undersea colony and a soldier from the colonizing land-based empire get trapped together in an undersea cave, and have to put their conflict aside and work together just long enough to save their own lives. They cannot speak to each other because, as combatants from opposing armies, their communication technologies are not compatible. As they seek to penetrate the rubble without bringing the entire cave down upon them, they begin by communicating with gestures, but before long, they discover that their eyes and their hearts issue more useful orders. When they succeed in making their way out of the cave, the rules of war dictate that their battle to the death must resume. Now they are faced with the hardest decision of all. What decision do YOU think they made?
By high school, I knew that what what I felt for other boys was more than what my middle-school best friend’s Boy Scout Handbook said was “normal experimentation” that generally ended around age 16. And indeed, I continued to explore homosexual feelings in the fiction I wrote as a teenager. But I would only go so far as to dramatize the intense but unspoken longing. I would never, in those days, write anything about actual sexual encounters with other boys or men.
In fact, by my first year of college, at the age of 18, I made a very conscious decision not to write any more fiction at all, because—and this is exactly how I stated it to myself—the only fiction I had any interest in writing was fiction about gay coming of age, and I did not want to write any fiction about gay coming of age, so I simply was not going to write any more fiction. I was not going to produce any documentary evidence, as it were, of the thing of which I was aware, but about which I preferred to remain in denial.
That self-imposed literary exile lasted ten years. In 1989, I wrote a short story called “Those Summer Feelings.” The title was borrowed from a song by Jonathan Richman. “Those Summer Feelings” was not about gay sex; rather, it was about the gay narrator’s relationship with a straight best friend. But there was nothing coy about it. It was straight up gaybidy-gay-gaybo gay fiction. And that was great. And more stories followed. Prometheus had come unbound at last.
Meanwhile, my interest as a writer was inexorably shifting from the bittersweet gay coming of age register to a different register that had more to do with the very harsh realities of being an out gay man during the AIDS epidemic. And there’s no reason one could not write fiction in that register. And writers did write fiction in that register. But for me, whose fiction was always so deeply autobiographical, I started wishing for some form in which I could dispense with characters and narrative arcs in which an initial equilibrium was disrupted by a conflict that led to a climax and a resolution and the establishment of a new equilibrium (a pattern I was taught very well by the renowned Hayes B. Jacobs in continuing ed workshops at The New School).
And then, one day, thinking such thoughts, I found myself writing three little bits of something-or-other in my Gregg ruled steno book. Here, see for yourself—
That New Year’s Eve, I visited my ex-boyfriend and forever great love of my life, Anthony Ibrahin “Tony” Salinas (1956–1994), in “the dungeon,” i.e., the basement apartment he inhabited in the home of his parents, Cuban emigrés Martha and Manny Salinas, in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Also there that night was Tony’s then-current boyfriend, Felix, whom I had met under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach one afternoon, and befriended (i.e., became fuck buddies with), and ultimately handed off to Tony when I entered a more “traditional” dating relationship with a guy named Michael who was the neighbor—in a tenement on Butler Place in Prospect Heights—of my beloved friend Marcos whom I knew from one of my two HIV support groups. It was a genius move on my part—Tony was born in Cuba and spoke fluent Spanish, while Felix was a recent immigrant from Mexico who spoke virtually no English. Tony was big and hairy. Felix was little and smooth. I knew they would hit it off. They did. They adored each other.
I took the above-referenced steno book with me that night, and as the three of us cuddled in Tony’s bed, I said, rather sheepishly, “Tony…I wrote these three little things I really like…and I think they may be poems.” Tony laughed. Tony found me very amusing. “Lemme see, Mikey Boy.” He called me Mikey Boy. I loved that. Tony perused the three little stanzas separated by the little rows of asterisks, the cherubic grin of those somehow always shiny lips never leaving his face. He knew perfectly well what the three little stanzas were about, and he clearly found that very amusing, too. He handed the notebook back to me, saying simply, “Mikey Boy, put ‘em together, it’s one poem.”
He was right, of course. That was Tony. That was the magic of Tony. Big, loud, messy, alcoholic Tony who sucked on Halls Mentho Lyptus Cough Drops seemingly nonstop to cover up the Vodka smell perpetually on his breath. He was pretty much always right.
I put the three sections together and titled it “Casual, Anonymous.” I’m cheating here a bit, because Poems Found in Notebooks is supposed to be poems that never got published, and “Casual, Anonymous” appeared in January 2015 in issue 17 of Assaracus, the journal published by Sibling Rivalry Press. Below is the form in which it appeared. I turned it into a pretty good poem, if you ask me.
Casual, Anonymous
Before you say a word, I am yours.
Take without asking.
Don’t explore, don’t discover.
Make use; make me do it.
It’s all too much and not enough.
This way is better by far.
I performed well, and you showed
your appreciation just enough—
some kindness,
a deft hint at tenderness,
but still within the bounds.
How adept we are at finding
one another—you who will take
so eagerly what I so easily give;
I who can swallow you whole
and taste nothing.If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
Thanks for Jonathan Richman song, I didn't know this one and love his work! Nice poem!