like a snail

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.