God is probably sitting up there rolling her eyes at all this mess on our planet anyway, and waiting to smack the shit out of someone...
-Greg Sawyer
-Greg Sawyer
PILATE TO JESUS
It is nine o’clock when I am writing this, all full of typos and about being a number of things which amount to a new thing. About this blackness, this queerness, this Catholicism, this communism, this practicality that makes up me, these lines done in red from my fingers typing fast the misspelled rough draft.
Firstly, what are we doing? I left my ex though he may say he left me. He will also say he is not an ex. See. Our worlds cannot touch because our stories do not meet. By his account and a straight account he is not an ex, though the straight world, if given details of our relationship will have to admit—unless it insists on loud, loud denials, that there was something less than ( I will say MORE than) straight about our relationship.
But, at any road, the mind of my ex is mad now because he has decided to be straight. Everyone wonders if you are born queer? He did not even know the word. I ask if someone can be born straight. It’s what he decided and when he decided to be straight he changed the whole story of us. The story he tells, which will be his official story, will remain the truth until it breaks his mind with madness and either snaps or experiences what is commonly called coming out .
So yes, I write so that someone else will not have the official story, so that I will have the official story, or the more interesting story. Women, Blacks, Browns, Queers, the wetbacks, the squint eyed, the too short have lived under an official story. There will be other stories now. Like, there will be my story. And I do not claim that it is the truth. Rather it is A TRUTH, it’s A STORY. It is my truth. That’s all I’m responsible for. And also, maybe it is a truth that will help. There is the truth you tell to restrict and there is the truth you tell to free. I’m a little more interested in the latter.
If we are going to be writers
—and in America this can be a bad business—
then we have got to stop thinking about the moneymakers
or at least know that they are a very very few of us.
If you are going to take up that mantle then look past
America and remember that when you started writing
it wasn’t to show off yourself, it wasn’t to say look at me,
look at me. You were trying to share something.
You were seeking something.
You hoped everyone else would seek it with you.
Money is good,
some would even say it is necessary,
but you need to stop thinking about that,
you need to stop thinking about your own fame
and what people in America read.
The world is bigger than America
Even if it hasn’t learned that just yet.
People in America…
they don’t need to read anymore,
and because they don’t need it—reading
is like dessert or learning to drink alcohol
to impress your friends.
So you will shake your head and wonder why
the purveyor of the cheaply wrought story is so often read.
Why even your own mother reads something you would
never try to write.
And you will compare yourself to the tomes or to the pamphlet sized books
that slip out of New York with abstruse phrases and clinical
characters about a life with which you can’t identify.
Everyone wants a life with which they
Can’t identify
Everyone wants candy
Or to read what they don’t understand
To sit back in dumb wonder.
But not a writer.
Such fine writings read by your professors.
No, if you are going to write remember
the poets all over the world who never made a dime
or were confined to prisons and had toes and limbs chopped off who
paid for their words in blood whose printing press was Golgotha,
their lives a crucifixion.
Remember the ones sent to the gulag or sent howling into the night to find the underground country who never came back.
Who spoke and all their burning words fell on deaf ears.
Who wept and no matter how hard, still their tears
Did not make hearts cease to be cold as stone
Remember the prophets who screamed over burning cities
and hailed the swarms of locusts as armies of God,
and the odd boy strung up to a fence and killed
who was his own sort of prophet too.
Take up this cup.
This inheritance:
All of it belongs to you.
ORACLE
FOR MIKE, RYAN, COURTNEY AND SEVERAL OTHER PROPHETS
Behold
We are surely in the last days
Your mirrors have visions
And midgets dream dreams
Behold
This is the time of miracles
And I see everything burnt to ashes
By flames
From heaven
And the brightest burnings of
The groins
And the groaning of the
Deepest longing of our loins
Jabob’s Ladder
Lust and love ascending
And ascending to the New Jerusalem
Behold
Where once ritz and saltine crackers
Rose up from the primordial ooze of
Mason-dixon and with hillbilly precision
Strung up Negroes in trees
Like ebony and chocolate drop
Ornaments
Like bleeding tensils
Behold now
In those same places
White women lay down
And give birth to black babies
And this
This is a miracle
Of the new age
Behold
Where once men took up guns
And blew each other away in Christ’s name
Now with a fleshly gun
And all new blowing
Maybe they may use the same name
To love
And still
Where the prophet speaks in truth and love
A hundred wolves run up to tear his throat out
Peace wolves
You never had a chance
Lie down
Here comes the lion
Here comes the Land
Behold
Spears into plowshares
Guns into romance
Kisses into bed
TO SOMEONE WHO ONCE SAID THEY DIDN'T GET POETRY
You said
You didn’t get poetry
You always made things hard
The rules are easy
One: learn to write
It is helpful
But more than that
Beyond the other skills
Learn not to lie
You never—no see,
You’re still doing it.
Lastly,
Have a great love
That is wrecked
A great fool that you kept far
Too long
And when he is done
Write
And weave lyrics
Till the venom is gone
LETTERS FROM AVERNUS
After you said you were done with me
And jumped off your bridge
Hopped off your ledge
Still your ghost kept watching me
You can’t have it both ways
From the mouth of Avernus your specter sent
Four letters
And each haunted missive was destroyed before I ever read them
I say you’re dead
But your ghost insists you live
You always insisted things that weren’t true
Like she meant nothing to you
As you hid all the rubbers
And every day your love grew for me
She staked her claim
A spare toothbrush
Eyedrops
And then you dropped from the face of he earth
And now you have nothing
IN LIKE
I like the person I’m seeing right now. We just started talking. I just met him last week. I like him a lot and like matters. A grand high love is wonderful, and I think grand high people get to have it, but it’s for the rocky moments, for the terrible times. For the other times like and a very strong like is necessary. Liking the person you’re with will sustain you.
Ben I loved. I loved him terribly, terrible being the operative word. I always said you would have to love Ben to be with him. He wasn’t a fun person. He was unreasonable, unresponsive, unavailable, unreal, unsympathetic, unemployed and, most important—unstable. He wasn’t a person you’d just want to casually hang out with. As my friends would say, “He’s good looking, but he’s crazy.”
And so it was required that I love him and I did to such an extent that it never occurred to me that between the hours of listening to him tell his hard luck story, talk about hating humanity, and how alone he felt despite the fact he had more friends than anyone that hapless had a right to, and a crazy whore who drove an hour just to fuck him and make him feel like a heterosexual I loved him, yes, but didn’t really like him.
He may read this. And so here are some things he should know because in his vanity—he always thought he was the center of the universe, and what a small universe that must have been—he will think, “He is obsessed with me. He writes about me. He is not past me.”
I am writing about my life, and he was part of it. It isn’t about him. People who get little love throughout their lives once they get a drop of it spoil it. They think, “It’s all about me.”
Even on my most loving day it was probably ten percent about him.
If I weren’t past him I wouldn’t write this. When a writer begins a story he says, “It WAS a dark and stormy night,” not “it IS a dark and stormy night.” We tell from the past tense. We tell what is done.
YESTERDAY
Yesterday at morning prayer the Bible passage tells us to beware of evil men. Who cannot go to sleep without thinking evil, who are not satisfied unless they have done a bad deed. Vengeance is always on their minds, they drink in violence. And I think how strange because this person I am watching for seems a lot like me.
At Mass, the mother of two rowdy girls sends them up into the communion line to receive a blessing. They do not find their place, but rather skirt through the knees of the communicants, bogart their way to the front of the line. They stand there, hands over chest waiting for the priest to bless them. The whole line waits for them.
And then one sister shoves the other to the church floor. Then the other sister shoves her. They do no real injury. They just love shoving each other, they are in a dance and a tangle until their exhausted mother arrives and swoops them away. And I think, these girls are a lot like me.
I talk to you so much better now that I pretend you're dead. And maybe that's the secret. Maybe in truth you always were...
INVOCATION
But the king of Hell should have more balls
You’re just a minor demon
Devil’s punk
And in the others you are a suicide
Now that’s about right
That’s about right
I only seem to be able to write eulogies to you
Last night I said kiddush for you
I burnt Indian incense
It was dark
It sent you on your way
On Halloween I’ll light
A jack o’lantern
While your lost soul’s
Off in Elkhart-Mishawaka Hades
Fucking the Fourth
Misspelled Month of the year
No, she won’t last to November
And you might not
I can see your corpse washing under a bridge
I think—my little german—I could write
About that
I seem to like you better
When you’re dead
I don't know that everyone needs a horrible relationship with a crazy person, but I believe everyone will have one. And if you're saying you haven't had one then that just means you probably were the crazy person. And if you haven't had one, and it turns out you are not crazy then please, have one of mine. I have been with enough madmen that I can pass a few on to you.
EULOGY
Scared and scarred,
many times dejected
love was the only thing you ever had to offer
and it was filled with holes and scorched by demons
I took it cause you held it out
In your hands
Eyes half mad
Scrambling about for affection
Oh, Laughter
Oh, Right Hand
You’d drop your trousers for a bit of affection.
The first time we took you out the light of the bar
Shining on your large forehead
Like the moon
Like the love starved moon
And you lay on your back and sucked love up like a sponge
And then spat it out—was it bad brandy?
Or was it just an unacquired taste?
REQUIEM
To you
Who are in Hades now
Eating ashes and pomegranates
Who does not believe in love or hope
And cries himself to sleep at night
Building about him towers of books and isolation
Setting up a web of lies he cannot cut himself out of
Self devouring spider:
Remember this
And keep it in your heart
Clutch it to your chest next time you weep all desolate
There is someplace,
Somewhere
On this round world
One soul who loved you.
WET
Got a cavity filled last night. My old dentist hired a new one to help him out and take over. She is, 6'0 Blonde, Ex-Navy. Holy Fuck Man. My wet dream before my eyes. She's married and has two kids. It was almost erotic in the chair with the gas, thinking of sticking my dick in the perfect teethed head of my new dentist.
--C. Herrell
Ben,
I thought about you a lot today. I think you don’t write back just to piss me off. Its working and that might not be such a good idea. Whenever I go around town and see things, especially with other friends I think how you would like it and I worry about you and wonder about you and then realize that the only reason I don’t know where you are is because you are the most childish asshole who ever walked the face of the earth. Then I put you out of my head.
That was a gift you have given me in the last few weeks. Your conduct, or lack of it, has been so shitty that I have finally been forced to realize what life without you is like. It’s actually quite free. I began to realize that as long as I was in that apartment, in your world I wasn’t really in mine and as long as we were doing whatever we were doing it meant you got to have someone who understood you like a significant other and then, when I left, someone you could fuck. And what I had was not much of a chance of finding a real relationship. As soon as I left all that I had to go out into the world. Or the town. Be single again, put on decent clothes, hit the scene, meet people.
I did something I have never done. Last Thursday we were at the hearth listening to a band and Laura pointed out the keyboardists. I said I didn’t do that, go up to people and I didn’t feel like being with anyone. That I realized now that I wasn’t in it I’d been in a protracted relationship with someone who was fucking somebody else and I really wanted to be left alone.
And then I looked at him and looked at him the whole night and finally sussed up the situation and went to go meet him. I’ve actually started talking to people, seeing people. I realized that I was glad you didn’t give me a chance because I think I’d be unhappy with you. As a significant other I mean. Not as a friend. You make a good enough friend, but I think you’d be a shitty anything else. I need the chance to meet other people, see what it could be like. I’m not talking about the One True. I’m talking about getting to meet people. Everything was so difficult with you. You never told the truth, you always wanted something, but didn’t. Wanted to touch, but didn’t. Were gay, but wanted to be straight. It was just one long session of frustration and indecision. And that got old after a while. I didn’t know how to look for someone else without being disloyal to you and them. This apparently never bothered you while you while you cooked for me, took me out places and then turned around and fucked someone else. With the keyboardist it might be nice. It would be sane. I’d like sanity.
I am thinking about you in a different way right now. Not in the old way, not really able to believe I thought of you in the old way. I think of you as the friend that I will see again when he comes around. I don’t expect you to respond to anything because at last you’ve ceased to be able to disappoint me. I don’t expect you to do anything. In the course of the last year it’s pretty much what I’ve seen you do—or not do. You call it laziness because laziness sounds cool, but it’s really timidity. You’re so into non-violence, not doing anything I wonder if you realize that doing nothing is its own form of cruelty. It’s cruel and childish not to return my messages—which is the reason I got rid of you the first time around—it’s cruel and childish not to confront issues and answer questions I’ve asked you too. You have your moments—my birthday was nice—but a lot of what you do is petulant and spoiled which is cute when you’re twelve, but pathetic at twenty-three. Actually it’s pathetic at twelve too.
--Chris
P.S. write back. Imagine all these letters posted on a public forum.
LOVE LETTERS: PART TWO
The truth is that from the moment I found you I was incredibly glad you were in my life. It wasn’t until really the last few months ago, that we became really good friends, that I knew beyond a doubt that you were the last person I would ever want to say something horrible to. Here I have said several horrible things. If I look over even one line of something I’ve sent then I think how it is so much to deal with, how could anyone respond to it? And yet, here I have sent several lines. After the time in the past when I was such a shrew I think I decided I had to repent and saying nothing at all, let everything build up inside me, let it come out in such confused ways that you could not have known what was bothering me. I wondered so many things that I couldn't say. To feel the week after you had come to my house as if I had the black death, untouchable. As if you were virtuous not to touch me at all, to shut yourself off from me your friend, whom you had been loyal to and I loyal to you these ten months though you had no problem ejaculating in the mouth of someone you hardly knew? You were dirty for kissing me though twenty four hours earlier with that same mouth you had eaten the snatch of someone who... quite frankly you don't know. You did all that, but touching me was the dirty thing? If anything I've written has caused you pain, then I realized that I myself have experienced enough pain too.
I said this would not be an angry e-mail and yet here comes other things I haven’t said, that I have swallowed. I’ll leave them alone for now.
The point is that, despite all that I have said this week I adore you. The problem for me has been looking so often at this person I adore and honor, know well, love well, but who makes me feel everything I put in those letters that I have been so afraid to tell him. Because all of it sounds so cruel and I don’t know a better way to put it. All of this week I have intentionally not looked at a picture of you or thought too much about you because then I could never have written what I wrote, but if I hadn’t written it, then it would be in my heart, then sooner or later we’d have to face all of that. I understand all your life you’ve done the same thing I’ve done, skate along the surface of the truth, even makes truths. But we cannot do that with each other.
I am writing this so that you can write me back and tell me when you will be back. You have every right to be angry or hurt and not let me see you again, to put it off for days but please let me know a good day so that I can come and we can talk.
Yours,
Chris
I read a passage from something I’d written earlier. I don’t push forward without looking back. It seems to me that all of my writing is really one long sentence, one theme with several variations, one something to say, and my career is saying as much of that string of words as I can before I die.
I don’t think there is such a thing as finding it. Finding the Truth, once and for all. For me there is the occasional and graceful stumbling onto the Great Secret, which is like a music or like a tapestry—or maybe both of those things are like It. It swirls and it swirls, encompasses all and does not explain all. No explanation is. All there is—is something like peace. Or maybe peace is like it. And then you pass out of it. And in all your work, in all your life and your loving you remember it. You carry a seed of it. For me loving and writing are like that.
When I was nineteen I sat in a Pizza Hut with a friend. She was twenty-three. Beyond the Roseland Welcomes You sign, I saw the university of Notre Dame and a green field. I said, “I will tell stories about this place. I will tell stories about the Midwest. I will write about people who didn’t think they were worth writing about.
No matter what I said about the Pentet, about moving on to write about other places—and I shall—I will not forsake this green corn, this black earth, the silver-blue-green water. A poet needs a home, needs a land under his feet that he draws strength from. This is mine.
All that I said... I never expected it to come out. But how could we have gone on with all of that between us? How could we have continued unless I said what I said?
LOVE LETTERS: PART ONE
Dear,
I’m sorry to deliver this bad news to you, and maybe you’re not going to want to speak to me again, call me all sorts of an asshole after I write this. That’s my second biggest fear. My real fear though is that you’ll blow it off and keep on denying some shit that’s pretty obvious and not just to me:
You’re gay. I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to put it. Maybe you don’t like that word, but if you’re not gay then what you are is as close to gay as cornflower is to navy or lilac to lavender. So let’s just use the word gay. I’m not being presumptuous or using wishful thinking. I know, I know, you sort of like girls, you find females attractive. You’ve eaten pussy. You’ve even fucked. You’ve had girls in the past. Blah, blah blah. No one has the right to tell you what you are. But when you embark on a massive campaign of denial, then someone should tell you and I’m looking around and the only person who’s going to be the angel of the Apocalypse is me.
You were gay when I found at least twenty gay porn sites on your computer and chose to say nothing. You were gay when you didn’t notice any girls in our philosophy class but got hooked on Kevin. You were gay when Julia at the library asked me how come you never talked to any of the pretty girls who came through. Oh, and when you started dating (yeah, let’s use that euphemism) Her and then you would strut down the street talking about, “I like hot chicks…” yeah, Ben, you were still gay. You were gay when you wrote a letter to Her saying “My Dearest, I want to be hugging and kissing you, but I like men and I’m going to describe how much I like them and how I always have only I’m going to make it sound like a sickness, and then at the end of the letter tack on, “but I’m not gay (though last time I checked, that’s what being gay is). I like girls too, don’t leave me.” You were gay when you made me read it first. You were gay when you’d sit up at nights in the apartment talking about how lonely your relationship with Her was. And you were gay when you met Her and for reasons unknown decided to start fucking her instead of just going out and finding a guy. It would have been just as sleazy, but a little more honest. Every time you have to pretend She’s someone else and She sits around—like a dumbass—saying, “I know my boyfriend talks about how he likes guys, but I can’t figure out why he isn’t in to me”—you’re gay, Love.
You were gay when you found out I’d had a boyfriend in the past and spent the next part of a month flirting with me. You were gay that night at Notre Dame when you stared real hard at that guy’s ass and incidentally, you’re gay whenever you check out men and think I don’t notice. You were gay when we watched lesbians fucking each other and you just yawned through it. You were gay when you slept in my bed. You were gay when we made out. And you were gay when you tried to forget it and act like nothing happened. Every time you make me sleep on your floor or hold yourself off from me and become cold because you don’t trust yourself, you’re gay. You can go through all the Trojans and Trustex’s in the world (which is, by the way, a dumb way to prove something to yourself) and spend five minutes feeling like a real heterosexual man and then leave your condom wrappers on the floor for me to find, and you’ll still be gay. You can get sucked off and pretend she’s a man to make yourself come faster and you know what? You’ll still be gay. You’ll just also be a really fucked up person incapable of being in a happy, sane relationship.
You’re gay. Quit asking me to deny it. Quit acting like its dirty and going on about how you like girls, all these girls you loved in the past. Just stop it. Stop revising stories and changing pronouns. Give me that much respect. It doesn’t have to be dirty. It doesn’t have to be you surfing around looking at fisting websites. It could be beautiful. It could be happy. You could actually start to feel good about yourself. But if you treat it like its dirty, like you’re dirty, then you will be.
Okay, so maybe you don’t like that word. Gay. Maybe you don’t want to be navy. You want to be cornflower. And maybe you don’t want to end up with me. But I think you will. Fine. But end up with someone. You know why you can’t be into her. But ask yourself this, if a girl KNOWS that the guy she’s with wants to be with other people, wants to be with other MEN, then why the hell would she hang onto you—no matter how much you begged—if she loved you?
--Chris
