Rough Trade

“But right now

you are dumb”

—Sylvia Plath

“For a Fatherless Son,”

Rain on Squatters

____________________

I adore your Stupidity—

You’re so Exquisitely Dumb

With your low Animal IQ—

Gnawing your Hair-Lip thumb

Cute Kansas Throwback—

Topeka Neanderthal Toughie

So RFD Ratty & Raunchy—

Cute FFA Farmboy Fillet

Bar-Z Ranch Smoothie—

Cocky Chevy Pickup stud

Your low Sloping Forehead—

Matching your Dull Wits

I’m utterly Entranced—

By your Juicy Gigolohood

No wonder you walk away—

With all my Jewels & Money!!!

Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Gay Midwestern Realism:
The Death Throes of Romanticism #5 

“They are so jealous 
of anything that is not 
flat! They are jealous gods
that would have the whole 
world flat because they are.”
—Sylvia Plath
"Three Women"
_________________

I suppose I had a typical type of writer’s block—
A sort of frightened Kansas gay imagination 

It’s pretty easy to be engulfed by those—
Paranoid rapid associative leaps being a fag

Str8t sociological and mythical tropes—
Didn’t help me to get it together very much

St8t literature and poetics conspired—
Together to make a Hell of Flatness

"Let us flatten all the souls of Kansas—
Make them as flat as the Tallgrass Prairie"

It’s pretty easy to launder such grossness—
Into symbolic figures of Plains Poetry

The symbolic dimension of the Flat Mind—
Exclusively Fly-Over transcendent & flat 

Embodying all the jealous assumptions of—
An imagined Family of Flat Stoic Existence

The immediate, terrifyingly Flat Present—
Conspiring with lies that can’t be trusted

Moreover, there’s all that male aggression—
That cynical deployment of butchy rhetoric

There was so little space for gay intellect—
Employment & expansion of gay consciousness 

How can one try to transcend such limits—
When one’s artistic self is so fucking Flat?

Closeted by the holders of power—
Crummy "mysteries" of the male flesh

When poetry approaches but never crosses—
The threshold of an active, healthy gay ego?

Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Gay Midwestern Realism:
The Death Throes of Romanticism #4

“one of the last romantics; 
and already her poetry seems 
to us a poetry of the past,
swiftly receding into history”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“The Death Throes Of Romanticism: 
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath”
__________________________

The moral assumptions behind gay poetry—
Had condemned for such a long time

But such moral predicaments weren't as—
Pathological as one might think

After all, conformity to a tacky—
Sick society is really a sign of Normality

It was hard to speak very clearly—
A language I could understand as gay

Saying what men have been saying—
For many centuries, though not so frank 

Trying to be sensitive as one can—
Without sickening with hatred for humanity

Sublimating does wonders for Acculturation—
Resulting in wondrous Achievements of Art

With all us fags coming and going—
Discussing the male wonders of Michelangelo

Let us assume that Gay Midwestern Realism—
Isn’t like the deathliness of str8t consciousness

The corrupting hell of the Renaissance ideal—
With "I"-ness, hetero and distinct from us

Not a masculine, combative ideal of "I"—
Struggling against all other "I's" in our Society

Rather a more hermetic contemplation—
Of a God-centered universe with gays

Is gay Midwestern Realism Goth enough—
Stoic Red State Republican-esque enough?

Looking beyond outmoded dying concepts—
Revisiting once-vital Renaissance ideals

Can we gay Midwestern poets be diagnosed—
As a fading genre of the last Romantics?

Is our GLBT poetry already dead—
A poetry past, swiftly receding into history?

Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Gay Midwestern Realism:
The Death Throes of Romanticism #3

“I am solitary as grass. 
What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, 
whatever it is?”
—Sylvia Plath
"Three Women"
__________________

What was it that Sylvia Plath lost—
Why was she only half-conscious of losing it?

I’ve asked myself that same question—
Feeling the way she felt for such a long time

I have to take it this loss is a real one—
Not a rhetorical echoing of a gay man’s cries

Not a queenly yearning that can be dished—
Seeking to dismiss it as simply “diseased”

Viewing being queer as Sodom & Gomorrah—
As original sin, evil, predestination & doom

But what’s a kid growing up in Kansas—
Supposed to know about gay consciousness?

Such fluidity and queenly intelligence—
Surely nothing more serious than a zit?

An adolescent perverse rebelliousness—
At its most profound a mere nocturnal emission?

These "few words" in our tacky bildungsroman—
Multiplied endlessly in all the books, lit crit

Perpetually renewed & self-renewingly perverse—
Convinced I was just full of faggoty nonsense

Prissy pronouncements by pushy-minded—
Wood Bloxom’s sneer at me every morning

Anita B. Rice’s saying she was simply appalled—
Every time I clicked my Magic Ruby Slippers

The raised eyebrows of Coach Sands & Gowdy—
Knowing I lusted after the whole Wrestling Team

And of course the Telepathic Well-Hung Ones—
Reading my filthy, dirty Mind every fucking day

No wonder they treated me so awfully crummy—
From a “healthy” society’s point of view

There’s nothing worse than a small town fag—
A Faggoty Poet on the Prissy Prowl 

And then there were all the cynical faces—
The smirky looks of unimportant boys

They knew I was jealous of what they had—
Especially the butch ones with ten inches

Peter Pan

Peter Pan

“I won the prize essay

in school and published

a novel before I was

twenty-five”

—Edgar Lee Masters

“John Horace Burleson,”

Spoon River Anthology

________________________

It was about that time that—

Miss Barrie showed up in my

Life, bumping into him down

There in Peter Pan Park, by

The City Swimming Pool with

All those cute lifeguards with

Muscles and nice hairy legs,

That’s when Never Never Land

Opened up just for me, down

By Monkey Island there by

Peter Pan Lake beneath the

Arbor, from then on I was

Pretty much invisible smoking

Dope and drinking wine with

My Tinkerbell lisp and a coy

Liberace swish, simply just

The cat’s meow, my dear,

Like surely nobody knew, but

Of course the whole town just

Smirked at me, Dishing me &

Definitely Reading My Beads    

Elsie Pine

“Well, don’t you see

this was the way of it”

—Edgar Lee Masters

“Nancy Knapp,”

Spoon River Anthology

_________________________

Elsie Pine took one look—

At me and smiled just like

Gertrude Stein there in

Paris except it was the

William Allen White Library

Instead and Miss Pine was

The Head of the School of

Library Science at KSTC,

And I was just a dumb little

Chicken in the Ninth Grade

Who loved to read books,

That’s when she nodded to

Me and told all the other

Librarians to let me into

The Stacks whenever I

Wanted which was half

My Existence in Emporia

Mike Foster

Mike Foster

“In life I was

the town drunkard”

—Edgar Lee Masters

“Chase Henry,”

Spoon River Anthology

_______________________

In life I was the town drunkard—

I was born in Cottonwood Falls 

And Emporia was my home,

But when I died the minister

Of the Faith Lutheran Church,

Tom Bird, denied me a grave,

Saying that Maplewood Cemetery

Didn’t deserve a drunk like me,

But after the good Reverend done

Murdered his wife & went to bed

With his church secretary, that’s

When all the prudent crosscurrents

Of the wise old Cottonwood River

Confluenced and joined together

Making my life not look so bad