like a snail I curl into myself and burrow under the protection of an aesthetic shell;
“I want to be this hole in your ear lobe so I can live inside you forever,” he said.
my grandmother passed down her tricks to my mother who passed them down to me,
and I pass them down to this poem,
as you inherit me.
I never read Rimbaud but I once wrote a poem of finding him in my ribs,
beneath the vestigial bones, nestled with Verlaine
he bloomed like a snake, in a paradise I didn’t belong to, yet housed within me.
it’s been a constant in my adult life that every artist I come to know and love,
has died before I had the chance to be born,
cruising their way to the grave.
I fell into queer life as Eve fell into the Bible,
a seemingly innocent story that turned out to be about my shortcomings,
and a lingering fear of death.
as Micha Cardenas writes:
the cut lies in the service of destruction
while the stitch heals, bringing two separate entities together.
I lay there cut open, and let you fill me with references;
Wojnarowicz; Hemphill; Chin; Mapplethorpe; Mueller; Foucault;
D’Allessandro; Abbott; Mercury; Blanchon;
Nomi; Ailey; Sylvester; Corey;
Eichelberger; Thek; Caja; Beam; Riggs;
Hujar; Haring; Gonzalez-Torres; Guibert;
(although, like Rimbaud I never read him, and love him all the same.)
cut open to the point of destruction, I drown in these references,
their names forming saturn’s belt around my chest;
i hula hoop the truth that
dead men reside within my flesh.