RODEO KID

He’s like riding a bucking bronco—

There at the Chase County Fair

Cinching the saddle, getting ready

Then the gate opens up—

And all hell breaks loose and

Just hanging on is everything

RFD Poetry—

It’s like riding a bunking bronco 

Sometimes you just gotta hang on

Sunken Garden

The Sunken Garden

“I only give you back

what you imagine”

—D. A. Powell

“The Fluffer Talks of Eternity,”

Useless Landscape

Just call me poor Alma—

In Tennessee Williams’ flick

SUMMER AND SMOKE  evenings—

There in the Sunken Garden

It was a lot more sunken then—

Back then in the late Fifties

I sank to my lowly knees—

Worshipping Earl Holliman types

Lots of bushes and privacy—

For those of us in the know

That’s where I got to meet—

Myself in the lovely night

I got to meet myself—

Alma Winemiller in the dark

Summer and Smoke

SUMMER AND SMOKE (1961)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jhFA82xvB4

Is there any way to describe it—

Alma there in SUMMER AND SMOKE

Dealing with her pent-up love-life?

Geraldine Page as Alma Winemiller—

A straitlaced Kansas minister’s daughter

Una Merkel not helping out very much

The same with hussy Rita Moreno—

Putting the make on Laurence Harvey

So tres typical of closeted Kansas yuk

Like with other Hollywood films—

Sitting there in the Granada Theater

The classic old film palace knew all

Tennessee Williams knew even more—

Reading my beads as if he were there

I became Alma & Alma became me…

TO KILL A MEADOWLARK 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t98LWNwUhI&list=PL91BCFB23AF892F9A

To be out here—

Out here in the middle

Of Fly Over State Nothingness

Back again I suppose—

Not really wanting to be

But then here I am standing

Looking down this—

Gaunt lonely country road 

Here in Chase County

My lover buried here—

In the Cedar Point Cemetery

My young now old lover boy

kANSAS

WELCOME TO KANSAS

MORNING

Waking up, another day—

Urging myself to get going

Pulling the sheets back again

Covering myself once again

How strange it is for one’s 

Heart to be loveless in the

Cold Arctic Kansas morning

__________

NIGHT DREAM

A slinky shadow rules me—

Cocteau’s chauffeur takes me

For long evening dream drives

His gaudy Cadillac convertible  

Cruising late at night there 

Downtown on Commercial St

From college to the tracks

_______________

MOVIE THEATERS

Nights are for dreaming —

Beneath the glowing lights 

The Dream Bijou marquee

No more Sat matinees—

Like back when I was a kid

Virgin in the Strand balcony

Elegant Granada Theater—

Not a dead Film Palace anymore

Movies & class reunions

______________

OBLIVION MON AMOUR

All I wanted was to be alone—

Alone in my back room with its

Bamboo shades and books

The rest of the house—

I left alone, my parents dead

I was left alone back then

Family photos tell it all—

Divorces and grandchildren

But I stayed single

Beneath it all obituaries—

My job as a college librarian

A desire for oblivion

_____________

FOR NOW

Sometimes I wanted to just—

Shrug my shoulders & leave

Quietly without a goodbye

I hated home I guess—

And having to be there

The same little town

But everybody died—

Moved away, so I became

A male Miss Havisham

I’ll die someday anyway—

Reprehensively perfect

They’ll say so knowingly

_____________

LESS DECEIVED

The sun’s occasional light—

Down thru the naked twisted

Elm branches along the street

Small college town full of—

Retired folks & old widows

Brittle and stiff as reeds

Each little home full of grief—

Along unhurried one-way streets

Like Constitution Street

Many of my teachers lesbians—

Their minds like drawers of knives

They were the less deceived

_____________

FLY OVER STATE

Flying high over Kansas—

Sighing and sipping my martini

“Emporia, that’s where I was born”

Smiling my friend said:

“Where you grew up and

where you had your roots?”

“No, just my unspent—

Youth and most of my manhood

Finally I couldn’t get out of there”

It was like dying down there—

Boys all biceps, girls all tits

Lonely wheatfields forever

Nothing much happened down there

_____________

EVENINGS

I digress though however—

I never did get out of there

I stayed there instead

Same sky, same streets—

The highway glutted with trucks

Railway tracks heavy with freight

Midwestern towns that way—

Rotting away from the inside out

Slipping down into oblivion

And above it all hanging—

The long summer nights

Nothing but prairie silence

____________

EMPORIA

Swerving east and west—

Gaunt Highway 50 moving

Through the little shithole town

Past grain elevators, haystacks—

Scarecrows, muddy snowy

Downtown spectral streets

Dead-straight thru town—

Isolate dingbat little hellhole

All the way to Colorado

Cheap suits, kitchenware—

Sharp knives, old brick

Commercial Street ruins

_____________

KANSAS

Loneliness clarifies everything—

Because there’s nothing left

But Flint Hills nothingness

Purple-bluish dead horizon—

Ending the land way out there

The range doesn’t talk much

Everything is out of reach—

Here cattle roam the range

Old limestone fences 

Silence ruling everything—

Negating anything human

Stoic Kansas prevailing

____________

NOTHING CAN BE SAID

Saying anything at all—

Means nothing to the ones

Living out there in Hills

Birth and death come—

And go slowly like seasons

Life is one long silent dying

Cattlemen like Jones—

Z-Bar Ranch Millionaire 

In Prairie Grove Cemetery

People in Strong City—

Don’t remember him much

They only think of the rodeo

EHS Fifty Years Later

Emporia High School Auditorium

Fifty Years Later (1962-2012)

Gay American Gothic

GAY AMERICAN GOTHIC

“We didn’t need 

dialogue. We had faces.”

—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

The lovely Kansas couple—

Posing for the gay painter

Grant Wood recently

The older gentleman farmer—

In his bib overalls stoically

Holding his hayfork

He’s the RFD sugar daddy—

Standing there with his young

Gay nelly farmwife partner

The New Depression’s here—

Foreclosures are dime a dozen

Way out here on the Great Plains

A couple of Fly Over State fags—

Posing with down-to-earth dignity

Silently staring at nothing

Ghosting Collages

Laurie Hoffman, “Red”

GHOSTING COLLAGES

Very nice. Tres spooky. Coming or going? What a mood you must have been in. "Red" is like the other collage with the boy on the bridge. Your collage ghosting almost makes me want to do a story about it. But then, you could probably tell a much more interesting story about the haunting picture than I could. 

Laurie Hoffman, “Boy on a Bridge”

I got into the Red Riding Hood fairy tale thing through a kind of circuitous route. My online astrologer is psychic I think. http://kristo.com/ 

Actually, I'm pretty sure of it. He’s uncanny… but also I've noticed his coincidences and synchronicities help my intuition to grow in ways I never quite anticipated...

He's a Jungian astrologer into dream analysis, fairy tales, intuition. He did a couple of horoscopes for me and CD disks that pretty much predicted my 2009 open heart surgery episode. His daily horoscope page is synchronistic with his intuitive insights right into my "now." He's not updating right now because he's working on a grant for a book on his Astrology Theory. He's an M.D. in Chicago. 

Anyway, his read on fairy tales and dream interpretation appealed to me & still does. He stresses "intuition" and how to develop your own intuition via synchronicity, coincidences, etc. 

Making the Red Riding Hood fairy tale 'relevant' to my life (growing up in Kansas), the Red connection goes into this poem "Telemachus" giving my parent's divorce a Greek-Fairy Tale twist... 

http://www.snarke.com/2013/10/telemachus.html

It's about the way I felt back then when my father returned from Korea in 1954, found out his wife wanted a divorce & didn't want to take us all back to Japan where he had an assignment as a military attache in Tokyo. 

It wasn't a pleasant divorce. Me and my 2 brothers got whisked away from Emporia and dumped up in Republic County in Belleville where my father's parents lived. My stark lonely memory of being stuck out there on the High Plains prairie not knowing what was going on...  

It had a bizarre nightmare fairy tale twist to it that encapsulated the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Kinda. Off to Grandmother's farm. Kidnapped by the Big Bad Wolf in his sportscar. Stuck out there in the middle of Nowhereville. In the middle of winter. Nothing but snow and endless flat Kansas prairie. It was just awful.....

I'll probably never go back to the Midwest... but still my Kansas bildungsroman will probably never leave me either. A kind of reverse Thomas Wolfe "Look Homeward, Angel" trope... with the exception being one can never go back home again... but also one can never 'leave' home either. I'm stuck with growing up back there. A sort of sweet-and-sour sauce predicament... :-)

Jungian fairy tale analysis with archetypal interpretation is interesting. My lifestyle back then... Even tho difficult, I can still imagine a gay doppelganger double of me still living back there. 

Ending up a gay librarian or high school English teacher and pretty much a Homonormative recluse like me now. Maybe not a gay published poet... but still back there in that little college town. A couple of blocks from the KSTC campus. Weird, huh?   

Telemachus

Telemachus

“Oh Pallas Athena—

my goddess guide!"

—Francois de Salignac

de La Mothe-Fenelon

Les Adventures de Telemaque

________________

After beating her up—

My so-called Odysseus

Distraught father didn’t

Know what to do

Back from Korea—

His wife wanting a

Divorce, his honor

Lost and his family

_____________________

So he dumped us—

All in his Corvette

And sped to his

Parents place

Young F-86 pilot—

Not knowing what to do

Except dump us three

Boys and then what?

_____________________

Adultery is nothing new—

How many Odysseus men

Have gone thru the same

Thing as war-torn husbands

Homer does his hero-trip—

Whether Iliad or Odyssey

The blind poet telling his

Classic story for whoever

________________________

I was too young to be—

Telemachus only in the

Fourth grade and there

Wasn’t any Pallas Athena

There’s nothing more—

Spectral and incredibly lonely

As an evening in the high plains

Of Kansas with no parents…

________________________

The Prairie leaned down us—

I couldn’t sleep I couldn’t think

I couldn’t do anything except

Exist in the lost RFD moment…

There was nothing to recover—

My boyhood was over and I

Didn’t exist anymore other than

Pretending night was day

________________________

I challenged myself—

In the only way I knew how and

That was my own journey into

The darkness that he went thru

The Nothingness of Exile—

From one generation to the next

Marriage after marriage failures

With or without Trojan Wars

Prairie Queer Fiction

PRAIRIE QUEER FICTION

 _______________

PRAIRIE QUEER FICTION

“Might it not be that all the

people we know are only

what we imagine them to be?”

—Sherwood Anderson, A Writer’s

Conception of Realism

____________

It seems like a—

FICTION to me now

The Fly Over State

Here I am—

Out here on the

Pacific West Coast

________________

Going thru photos—

Old scrapbooks and

Prairie memorabilia

Did I actually—

Live way back there

In the Kansas Midwest?

 

QUEER RFD

“For Theodore Roosevelt,

rural men and women

represented the very “stay

and strength of the nation

in time of war, and its

guiding and controlling

spirit in time of peace.”

—Colin R. Johnson, Just

Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

________

But not just that—

Rural America provided

Soldiers & fighter pilots

To fill the ranks—

Of all those world wars

And overseas conflicts

________

Going back thru some—

Old photo albums that are

Decaying into Forgetfulness

I came across this pic—

Entitled rather adroitly

“Welcome Home Hero”

__________

Yes, my dears—

There I was with Daddy

And all the relatives

Nobody knew then—

I was a ditzy queen…

Queer RFD incarnate

GROWING UP GAY IN KANSAS

“Queer activists and queer

scholars have little use for

“benevolent toleration” these

days.” — Colin R. Johnson,

Just Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

___________

Things changed though—

Once my nelly faggotry

Became quite apparent

Yes, Daddy Dearest—

Once I told him way

Back then in college

________

He cursed me just—

Simply awful, refusing

To ever talk to me again

To my great dismay—

I had a rather nasty

Nervous breakdown

_________

Becoming the victim—

Of a near fatal bleed

Nasty peptic ulcer

So much for str8t—

Small town Kansas

Homonormativity

RFD QUEER THEORY

“Indeed, many of them

understandably question

how “benevolent” toleration

can ever really be in a

society that is structurally

heteronormative as American

society is.” — Colin R. Johnson,

Just Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

_______________

Actually, my dears—

Growing up in a Midwestern

Small college town wasn’t

That much different than—

Being a fag farmboy out

There in the Kansas sticks

_______________

FFA Boys in their butchy—

Cowboy boots and blue

Corduroy tight jackets

They didn’t much like—

Faggots any better than

Daddy Dearest did

_________

Animal husbandry—

Was totally, completely

Hetero, honey

No fucking around—

At the County Fair &

Gawd NO at the Rodeo!!!

GAY INTOLERANCE

“This is partly because

seeking to be “tolerated”

hardly constitutes a

particularly high bar for

meaningful social

transformation.”

—Colin R. Johnson, Just

Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

_________

For a nelly little queen—

Nothing I did could ever

Justify any kind of tolerance

I suppose if I’d have been—

A flaming queenly queer

High School Cheerleader

__________

Like Jimmy Stevens was—

I could’ve got away with

Lots of hanky-panky stuff

Scoffed at and tolerated—

As just a dizzy nelly fag at

All the basketball games

_____________

Sneered at sarcastically—

As just a Pom-Pom Queen

Nothing but a Circus Clown

Harmless, of course—

Just one of the local girls

Having a funny dishy time

DISHY DÉTENTE

“But it is also because

toleration usually ends

up as strained détente—

a highly compromised

form of “freedom” and

an arrangement that

arguably helps to bolster

the social and political

legitimacy of the dominant

faction.” — Colin R. Johnson,

Just Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

____________

One could become a—

Queer hairdresser, maybe

A queer church organist

Perhaps a gay jewelry—

Store owner specializing

In nice str8t wedding rings

____________

Maybe a nelly pianist—

Mincing about there in the

Local little teacher’s college

But still everybody knew—

Especially all the married

Kiwanis small town members

___________

Mocking the bachelorhood—

Of those that stayed behind

To endure the chastisement

The lucky faggot few—

Who didn’t have to tolerate

Nagging wives and brats

HETERO HAUGHTINESS

“Unfortunately dominant

factions are often

responsible for creating

conditions of intolerance

in the first place.”

—Colin R. Johnson, Just

Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

___________

There was this rather—

Effeminate grocery store

Long-time gay employee

Who had to tolerate—

Once a year the prejudice

And effrontery of Str8ts

___________

At the tacky local—

Emporia Kiwanis Club

Evening get-togethers

A small-town rendition—

Elitist British Men’s Club

Snotty Str8t Snobbery

____________

They’d sing this special—

Song to their one and only

Unmarried Faggot Bachelor

Snarky singing their—

Haughty trashy superior

Homophobic intolerance

CYNICAL QUEERDOM

“Thus, queers who openly

express suspicion about

the notion of “tolerance”

are probably justified.”

—Colin R. Johnson, Just

Queer Folks: Gender and

Sexuality in Rural America

___________

After our gay cheerleader—

Jimmy Stevens died of AIDS

In New York City early on

Yours truly tres realized—

Surely gays were doomed

Whether they escaped from

____________

Small-town tacky Kansas—

Or whether they lived in gay

NYC or San Francisco

So much for gay Tolerance—

Hundreds of thousands of

Gays dropped dead like flies

_______________

Even now with safe sex—

And new anti-viral advances

The Band Still Just Plays On

Big City Gay Liberation—

Wouldn’t it be safer to be

Small town KS closet case?