The Secret Life of This Life Now #18
18th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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If I can persuade 100 or so people to order a copy of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, that book will be blissfully out of print. These essays are a ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.
To sweeten the pot, I am offering you both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US. Click here to order yours now!
This is post #18 in this series. Still in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—18th in the book overall—is “Pictography.” Below is the first stanza of this 20-line poem.
They declared war on me,
but I was no warrior, so I left—
wandered deserts alone,
spoke no one’s language,
knew no one’s customs.
I invented civilization with every step—
every footprint a cuneiform wedge—
alphabet, syllabary, pictograph:
hope, love.This poem refers to the transition from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood. when queer children start to assert their deviant sex and gender identities, and families—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—resist, rebel, and retaliate.
In the previous Secret Life, I wrote a bit about my middle school years, the early to mid 1970s. I started high school in 1976. I had lots of crushes on boys, and broke the hearts of a number of girls who dated me, or wanted to date me, and upon whom I lavished charm and attention, until there would be a line of intimacy and affection that I could not cross, and I would begin to drift away, and they would not know why, and maybe they would ask me why, and I would not be able to tell them. At first I was not able to tell them because I was not really sure myself. But soon enough, I knew exactly why, but I was not ready to disclose, so I just left them feeling shitty about me—but even worse, feeling shitty about themselves. What had they done wrong? Nothing, of course. And I could even say that, but without an adequate explanation of what was going on with me, those assurances on my part rang hollow.
That’s enough about that for now. I’m going to share a previously unpublished prose poem set in the summer of 1979, my transition from high school to college. Grace Gold was not a girlfriend. She was a casual friend, a neighbor, a year ahead of me in school. Her memory is cherished by many and is for a blessing.
[Note: This is a prose poem. Substack does not support justified text.] Graduation Day Grace Gold was beautiful and dizzy. Red hair, creamy skin, lips full as a promise. Spacey Gracey we called her in high school. So smart she was always somewhere else. How she haunted me the summer of 1979. Had she really walked me home just a year before, talked about college, the future? Had she really gone off to college, a credit to our whacky experimental school? Had we really read the news that spring: GRADUATION DAY AT COLUMBIA—BARNARD FRESHMAN. Teenage girl walking down Broadway, maybe thinking about a summer job, a summer romance, when the masonry fell and where there had been Grace now there was only space. How like Gracey to die that way. How it haunted me that final Coney Island summer. Was this what I was in for? The papers said Grace never knew what hit her. It didn't make me feel any better. First my father, biopsy to coffin in twelve days. Now this. How it could all end in a split second. How you could never know.
À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.
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I am so enjoying this