They don’t want to hear about you
you’re not their kind
color, height, smell and gait
sets you apart, making you unpalatable
cast out from something you never belonged to
your back is curved before you hit the ground
sans parachute
cowing in utero to the inevitability of rejection
this is you, yellow girl, jaundiced before birth
you enter the world with a cigarette in one gnarled hand
the other high in protest
Gloria Steinem. could learn a thing or two about
your resolve
while she grew up in affluence and chose her metal
you were given nothing but inherited disease and
a penchant for purposing
all this in the time when women were
supposed to cross their legs in polite company
and open them for their husbands every whim
it disgusted you, the hypocrisy of hate
people at your Baptist church crowing gospel
calling you sinner when they caused more harm
than any so-called pervert
sent to camp to straighten out, you
fell for your coach and she for you
making out behind the outdoor toilets
confirmation of bias in the unhooking
of her clumsy sixties bra
feeling the first areola and you were lost
to any other kind of conversion
I wish I’d known you then, when eyes bright
despite the infernal din, you struck out against
the norm, trying daily not to let that
milk of magnesia asking that you straighten out
cause shame
it’s hard isn’t it? When even those pretending to
‘understand’ leave you out of invitations and the like
because you’re different, you’re not looking for a penis
not putting up posters of James Dean but Farrah Fawcett was okay, nor
waxing your legs for Friday nights
you didn’t like what every other girl in the changing rooms
coveted and so, they turned their tanned backs to you
and left you alone
to think of why you had more in common with
Billie Jean King and Radcliffe Hall
than cheerleaders with pom poms of scorn
and football players who would rape you to show
what you were missing
was it really such a sin to want to love
another woman? What was it about how you felt
scared them into loathing? And why when they knew
did it seem such a sport to exclude you?
Until you wrote pain on the insides of your wrists
a dowry of teenage repudiation
ending up in a mental hospital where the nurses
were all secret dykes and you fingered each other
at midnight, hiding your disappointment behind
seventies lino
this wasn’t love either, anymore than lying beneath
a grunting boy, at 14, hoping to fuck out the
feelings people said were evil, though
his use of you, seemed far more abhorrent
than the dreams you had of girls
not just any girl either, not just a writhing
creche of women parts, but one startling woman
you hoped to meet, among the girls who would be boys
and the girls who would be bi on dark and cheap drink weekends
gay bars were undoubtedly
some of the saddest places in the entire world
you neither excelled at pool or darts, you couldn’t
join in anymore there with cunnilingus against bathroom stalls
graffiti the tired penitent of fallen souls
with strangers who reminded you of boys in make up
you didn’t want to be with a girl who hated being a woman
dressing more like a man than your father
you wanted to love another woman with all
her madness and her fluxes, the rise of her lace covered breasts
how her thighs were not muscled but soft and her lips
pillows for your fevered whispers
no such woman seemed to exist back then
when gay venues were often raided by bored
knee-jerk religious police seeking to molest a girl in
baggy trousers and flattened chest on Friday night
shame after all, is a universal weapon and you
had tasted its liquored lash many times by then
watching your friends beaten with sticks by
heady boys in pick-ups waiting outside bars, high on local beer
and blood lust
you were too small to protect anyone, but witnessed
with grief so sharp it left marks in your eyes to think
of how the strongest girls rushed to defend the weakest
struck down by weapons wielded by the ‘righteous’ oh! Texas!
You were such a loathing state and things haven’t really
changed so very much
they still close their doors
they still tell their daughters
“don’t play with her, she’s queer that one”
and as grown up as you are, the pain is twice folded
for you wished by now things would be different
with laws and blood spilled surely paving a way forward
you forgot, for every step, there is one backwards
still just as you resolved to go without
you found me and still I found you
among the carnage, and our own wrecked self-destruction
still we laid in darkness sharing our stories
I tracing the scars on your arms and thighs
like Sanskrit of former muzzled lives
when I looked in your tired eyes I saw
how long you had been watching
this cruel world destroy her rainbow
heavy children
sometimes the greatest love comes
from broken people
too late in their August lives
to kick up chipped heals
they find solace in the depths
of their much labored, chambered heart
for as much as they punish us for existing
we keep returning, generation after generation
unbidden, unwanted, labeled abominations
or just silent dismay
carrying our quelled pain in beseechment
the whole world unsure of how to treat us
often resorting to ignoring
for who knows what to do
with something different? I still
don’t hold your ink stained hand in public very often
fearing I suppose our heads being bashed in
or someone cutting silence with ugly laughter
I think I could handle my own
abasing but never yours
you’ve worn the brand long enough my love
I now aim to remove it, defend you
as you saw the bloodshed longer than most
young men mowed down by AIDS sucking
their last breath through second-hand
straws, emaciated by the squander of
their worth, by a society intent on
blaming someone., anyone, in their aimless pointing
Reagan in the office doing nothing
beneath his hollow cross
even Obama had to ‘evolve’ his
opinion of gay-marriage like it was a
right that should be earned rather than
possessed naturally
but after all we are not
considered very natural
are we? Funny really …
as being with you
is the only natural
state of being I have ever
felt.