The Secret Life of This Life Now #21
21st in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.
Secret Life has been away for about six weeks. This series will not succeed in selling out the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started Secret Life and I’m going to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim full-length or—to quote a well-known poet who reviewed the book—“fat chapbook.”
My offer still holds—Both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #21 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are at the end the second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” The last poem in this section—21st in the book overall—is “Secret.” It is a brief poem, and very important to the story of the book as a whole, so for the first time in the history of Secret Life, I share a poem from the book with you in full:
Secret
Remember when walks on the beach
led to trysts in the cool sand beneath the boardwalk?Disease then crept through your body,
but you kept it at bay with a churning engine of desire.Now you wash the virus away
like silt through a hollow drainpipe,and this life now is the better life, but oh,
how the cool sand calls.
Remember, you can get This Life Now AND the sequel poetry collection, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Click this link to order yours now!
As you may notice, this poem contains the phrase that is the title of the book, “this life now.” It would therefore only be natural to think that I pulled that phrase from the poem and made it the title of the book. But it fact, it’s the other way around. I had decided to call the book This Life Now, and I needed that phrase to appear in some poem somewhere in the book.
The earliest version of the manuscript stored on my computer is dated January 28, 2006. I know, right? Poetry collections can be a long time coming. The file itself is called “attempted manuscript,” and there is no book title indicated anywhere in the document. The poem you see above with the title “Secret” was a section of a three-part poem titled “Random,” and it included only the first three couplets of the four-couplet poem you see above.
The first version of the manuscript to have a cover page is dated July 29, 2006. The title on the cover is This Life Now. There is a poem in the manuscript titled “This Life Now,” but that poem did not end up in This Life Now. Instead, it ended up in my second book, Drug and Disease Free, under the title “The Rock.”
Sometime in early 2007, I sent a version of the manuscript to Peter Covino to get his input. We still sent print copies of things in those days, and within a few weeks, Peter returned the manuscript with copious and invaluable comments. I probably have that paper copy with Peter’s handwritten comments somewhere in my file cabinet, but I’m not going to look for it now. The next version of the manuscript on my computer is dated April 14, 2007, and the file is called “post-Peter-comments.” The poem “Secret” in included in that version of the manuscript, as you see it above, with the fourth couplet included,
So—Why that title, why that poem, why that couplet, why that phrase?
By 2006, the year I started assembling that manuscript, I was a gay man legally married to another gay man. I had not died of AIDS. I had come through a lot, as we all come through a lot. A lot of gay poets of my generation where starting to write individual poems and in some cases poetry collections about the AIDS years and about longterm survival with HIV. A lot of those poems and those books seemed to focus on the past. I wanted to write a book that gave the past its due, but whose bottom line, so to speak, was not the then and there of the struggle, but the here and now of survival. I wanted to write a book about this life, this life that I was living, this life now.
That’s why I wanted to call the book This Life Now.
And so I did. But at the same time, I had something of a secret; namely, that I missed my old life. I missed gay bars and hookups, sex in public places, sex in private clubs. Walks on the beach where I picked up guys like sea shells, and tossed them back in the sand just as quickly and easily, with just as little regret, and infinitely more pleasure. I missed Randy and Tony and Marcos, all dead by then. To a degree, I even missed the struggle for survival, the game of waiting out AIDS and betting it all on staying healthy, or even just alive, long enough to be there for the treatment, if not the cure.
And that, my friends, is why I took a very short poem that somewhat romanticized the struggle for survival at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and waxed somewhat wistfully at how much we took for granted our turns of good fortune—why I took that poem and added to it the following couplet:
and this life now is the better life,
but oh, how the cool sand calls.
I’m not sure how many readers of the book found that couplet as, well, as earth shattering as I did. Almost literally earth shattering, the way it blows the heavy-duty plate-steel door right off the hinges of my comfortable new life as one of many survivors of HIV infection and one of the first handful of legally same-sex married gay men in the United States.
I think that’s as far as we need to go for now. We have ten more installments of Secret Life in which to dig deeper into that fundamental contradiction. À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.
The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:
1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.
2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.
Agree that the ending couplet re the cool sand is devastating. And I like the metaphor of picking up and tossing sea shells.
Amazing images!