4 poems

as luck would have it…

having fallen again, call it denial, call it a river of love, rushing by…

love may conquer all

but pathologies always win

over-riding romance

with one bold stroke

of bloodthirsty genius

all those devastatingly handsome vampires

refusing to suck your blood

he-bitches craving God’s mistaken race

half in love with fairies

as luck would have it

he met him so close to a full moon

but not close enough

just a sliver, a French tip of desire

and if there is a man up there

he is dying slowly of a joking heart

having come to terms with the last lunar eclipse

that left him in the dark

*

two defensive strokes / one haiku

hand guns called his name

slipping into simile

like razors into veins

this was not a suicide note

just a jagged love poem

longing for another waltz

lyrical weapons

designed by moths to shade them

from the jaded light

*

Oranges & Roses (five pretentious stanzas)

one

the pretentious sentimentality of the clouds

hovering over us

rain, sleet, snow, obstructing horizons

causing thunderstorms to cower

two

the pretentious sympathy of the very poor

rationale behind the strategies some rich people

employ when they describe their personal ideology

on charitable behaviour

three

the pretentious packaging of oranges and roses

in the snow - like Queen Anne and her naked slave boys

dying dark against the frigid whiteness

as they dance for ghosts

four

the pretentious way of suggesting

Queens had any real power

over the colonization of birthing bodies

and inviting Pocahontas for tea

five

the pretentious desire to take a road trip to Virginia

just to see whether they sell snow globes  

of a famed ‘Indian Princess' and her mis-taken Cowboys

the beloved, savage, civilization of global tourism

oranges & roses eaten among            

                                                            clouds

                                                                        wealth

                                                                                    snow

                                                                                                tea

                                                                                                            travel…

*

gun control   (three cozy palindromes)

snuguns

snugguns

snug guns

*

the virus is making its magic tonight

the virus is making its magic tonight...

the virus is making its magic tonight

huddled in this strained embrace

we try to love each other against all odds

resisting metaphors to war

attacking fear with love

rather than anger - not anger

entire patterns of kaleidoscopic organisms

composed by two strands of RNA

fifteen types of viral proteins

from the last host cell infected

entering immune system cells

building viral copies

each molecule playing

harmonic roles in this process

from the first steps of attachment

to the final process of budding

we have found a way to bloom

in these final diagnoses

the pain we feel is neither

sweet nor sour but both

the pain is lasting

and we find ways to endure

to create nostalgia for so many futures lost

there are no soldiers here

no weapons

just a body and its own private virus

un-camouflaged distinct

in some everlasting clutch

grabbed from a world

filled with worrisome warriors

wanting so desperately to name it out of timeworn kinship

into realms of scapegoating

and histrionic imperialism

begun as a massive strategy for the destruction of an identity

the dubious normalization of queer

that had been so hard won we cried in streets

rosy triangulations vigilant on thoroughfares

only to be harshly chaperoned by false scientific jargon - chat

herded along grid-like routes to the ridiculously sublime missteps of time

the absence of the truth

of tenderness and touch

and now we have it here

in a plethora of bodies

abundance with but one choice to love it and ourselves in and out of loss

to toss our sense of me and I in the end

without regretting middles and beginnings

yes, we huddle in this strained embrace

composing entire brilliant patterns of kaleidoscopic chaos

disseminating ordered mayhem we may one day conquer

free to make this choice on loving death

and the abject fear of isolating ourselves from our detractors

bending viral loads into symbolic signs swaddled and beheld - for bodies to enfold

yes, huddled herds - virions of valiant sympathy and hard won grace…

FOUR LONG 'ISH POEMS

self-portrait of the artist as a middle-aged malcontent 

(a triptych)

           one

i sat on top of a mountain

            rejected manuscripts

            stuck up my ass

waiting to be included

            in a ‘best poems’  anthology

            i am still waiting

cold, wan, rash

            rolled, soiled pages

            weighing heavily

upon my urethra

two

            i committed myself

            to making a new piece of art

            every day

ended up with sore arms

and a very crowded apartment

         three

           through the threat of cataracts

     detached retinas, missed eye appointments 

           and intermittent dental care

i see every word as precious

            hanging on each syllabic turn

            white mice in peanut galleries

swinging softly by their tails

            in deluded fog           

‘the privileged poor’

my kitchen is the size of a large closet

my bathroom is the size of an impossible storage unit

my bedroom is an equity banned dressing room

I am subsidized to the tits

and have no more space for judgment

but I have enough room

for the hard won oxymoronic

identificatory praxis of the privileged poor

for what the supreme global dwelling place for colonizers call

their democratic right to shop and to be shopped for

so don’t cry for me Central America

let no country

that has been fucked by  North American complicity

shed a tear

for the tremulous fault line of rampant capitalism

as it fucks me

treats me like a well fed pig

apple in my mouth

skewer in spit

i spin and sizzle

awaiting, stinking, smug, impatient

for the well cooked

insatiable excremental excitement

of your gorgeous hard won

wrath

strolling shot/shouldering love

sitting in the front row alone

driving into film with a backseat lightly grazed by random cinephiles

he stretches one arm in a pink fleshy triangle over his head

fingertips resting lightly on the top of his right shoulder

soft tips sink nimbly into puffy skin

this faintly discernible intrusion into self

close to the bone

he gobbles devours endures celluloid moments

where he is safe outside the scene

someone onscreen  starts to cry

someone else onscreen puts their hand on the crying someone’s shoulder

then the crying someone turns to the consoling someone

resting his head so gently on their shoulder

as the tips of the spectators fingers sink further into the flesh of his own heart

skeletal blades and connecting tissue become crevasses of desire

his arm stretches toward some unattainable limb - some bodily matter

he is penetrated so tenderly

his hand is having sex with his shoulder

this unbeatable trust between limb and body - body and limb

in middle age these seconds minutes hours matter

providing erotic detached filmic comfort

still reeling in his mind

all those distant lovers mourning a lack of sexual forgiveness

making love to their lost selves

fingertips on their shoulder blades

ready for their close-ups

mourning memories of tenderness clawing deep

absolving hollows from self-embargoed love

five reasons why I really hate my poetry today

one

I really hate my poetry today

I hate its lyric sadness and the way

it wanders with such pomp through come what may

declaring courage in the face of doom

detaching from humanity by describing all the stuff that fills a living room

two

I really hate the way I have with words

they tumble out in microscopic herds

rattling my teeth and sending shivers through my underwear

I really hate the way they seem to care

about what’s right and wrong and what seems so damned unfair

and how they always end up with some citation to some stranger’s pubic lair

three

but most of all I hate the rhyming couplets

thanking gods for a lack of exuberance over poetry in quintuplets

so I write in fives just to piss my sad self off

so I can look in mirrors and smirk then scowl then scoff

then covet some pricks hat I’d like to doff

or doff some prick who likes to covet dicks

but that was five and this is one past six

four

chairs and lamps and tables interest me

I should have been a carpenter like that stud from Galilee

I would have filled the world with furniture

Instead of furnishing the world with love

I would have tipped my cap to our Lord Jesus 

with one agnostic leather glove

I would have craved some godly wisdom when push came down to shove

five

but instead I’m here and hating my poetry so god damn much

just lifting my fingertips to the keypad is like poison to the touch

but yes, such pretty poison I can’t seem to get enough of

as one bard said, these are what make our lives

the stuff that dreams make muck of

p.s.

so let’s raise a toast to words and all they say

like shit! goddamn!

and

“kind sir, have you ever considered becoming, just long enough to kiss me, GAY !!! ? ”

photos, top to bottom; Madame X, Madame Recamier, Eleonora Duse, Martin Sheen, Rupert Brooke

MARTINI MEDITATIONS

Boston

                                                                   I like to have a martini,                                       

                                                                 Two at the very most.             

                                                                   After three I'm under the table,      

                                                                     After four I'm under my host.            

                                                                          ~ Dorothy Parker
   

                                                             For gin, in cruel

                                                          Sober truth,

                                                           Supplies the fuel

                                                              For flaming youth.

                                ~  Noel Coward

I'm sick sober and sorry

I'm broke disgusted and sad

I'm sick sober and sorry

but look at all the fun that I had

~ Tex Atchison & Eddie Hazelwood       

                         Venice                                    

I thank God for the

small but beautiful way

in which alcohol

has touched my life

today

                       ~ David Bateman

CELEBRITY DELUSION

CELEBRITY DELUSIONS #1  

‘the mind & the heart’ 
 

                                                                  Hello? David? Are you there? Why won't you pick up? 

                                                                  I keep trying to call to get you to meet me at the beach. 

                                                                  Wear the  two piece pink bikini I like so much. 

                                                                  Please return my call or eventually I'll give up. 

                                                                  Why are you ignoring me? I just want to be friends...*



*fictional, needless to say...    

It’s not that conservatives don’t care. 

We do. We just have different answers than liberals do. It’s a difference of the mind, not of the heart. 

*

I live a pretty simple life. 

*

Son, never throw a punch at a redwood. 

actual Tom Selleck quotes from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/tom_selleck.html              

                                                                                                                            

On a bitter cold night in Calgary, just before the turn of the last century, I stood waiting for the number one Bowness bus to take me home to my damp basement apartment in a working class suburb on the edge of an oil rich city. The bus stop was right beside a posh Italian restaurant. As I stood shivering in the cold a white stretch limousine pulled up and Tom Selleck got out and went into the restaurant without even saying hello to me. Which was not in the least bit surprising because he had only met me once very briefly when I had been an extra in his film Three Men and a Baby several years before in Toronto, and we didn’t actually meet. He just cruised me as he went to his dressing room. I have no proof that he was in fact cruising me but it makes my life a little easier to bear if I tell myself, once every six to eight months, that I was once cruised by a handsome Hollywood star. He did look straight at me, but that may have been due to the fact that I couldn’t stop staring at him. Leonard Nimoy directed the film and spoke to me at one point. He told me to be more animated. I knew he wouldn’t have pointed ears but that didn’t stop me from staring at them. 

That second time Tom and I didn’t actually meet, in Calgary, in the winter, I tried not to stare into the restaurant window too often as I waited for the bus. But it just took so long to come and although I was certain it was Tom Selleck in there, warm and cozy and enjoying fine red wine and pasta or veal or something delicious, I just couldn’t stop looking to make sure it was really him. I knew he was in town making a film so it made sense that the tall handsome guy who got out of the limousine and looked just like him must be him. But that’s the thing about famous people. When I do see them I can’t quite believe that they really exist. Once I shook Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s hand in a crowd of people in my hometown and I wouldn’t let go until I was sure the hand I was clutching belonged to the body of the Prime Minister of Canada. A few more seconds and I might have been arrested. 

I have never had sex with a famous person, and this late in life I don’t expect to, unless I run into David Hyde Pierce or Nathan Lane or Brent Carver at a little fey bistro one foggy night, and they take pity on me and invite me to their place for some scotch and intimate foreplay. It strikes me as an incredible improbability that I would probably never recover from. How can one expect to ever fully recover from having had sex with a celebrity? I know I couldn’t. It would consume me for the rest of my life. For years I believed that a close friend had sexual relations with Tony Perkins when he was in Toronto playing the lead in Equus. It turned out that they had just cruised each other in Yorkville one afternoon. But somehow I managed to carry that bit of false information with me for years without realizing it was untrue. I guess I just wanted to believe it so badly. I would look at my friend and just marvel at how he could actually carry on with his life after having had sex with a movie star. I would probably have a t-shirt made and wear it constantly.  

My naïve, bordering on idiotic gullibility has never ceased to amaze me. I also believed until I was fifteen that a cousin fell into Niagara Falls on a family trip and survived. It turned out that he fell into the swimming pool at the hotel. Years later another cousin actually did jump into the falls. She didn’t make it. Needless to say, tragedy and comedy often occur at different times in the same place. 

The only thing that haunts me more than the possibility of having sex with a celebrity is the chance that perhaps I did have sex with a famous person once and didn’t realize it at the time. Could that have been Mel Gibson or Michel Foucault or John Travolta or Tom Cruise that giddy night at the bathhouse? With my luck it was probably Foucault. I am also probably connected to Nureyev in some way, but for the love of God, who isn’t! 

I did have sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with a character on my favourite soap opera. This person, who will remain nameless, took the soap star to his home on a reservation in a coastal Canadian city and his mother was scared the whole time because she thought the guys character on the soap was such an evil person. I was always very impressed that she let her son have sex with another man in her home. Over the years the character’s moral fibre has improved a great deal. Perhaps it was due in part to his experience on the reservation that night.  

The soap in question is made in Hollywood and if you believe in the whole six degrees of separation theory then I have had sex with every major Hollywood star from the past two to three decades and beyond. Rock Hudson tends to cover a lot of ground in the six degrees theory since he was a mid to late century Hollywood icon who slept around. I must be connected to him in some way, which of course means that I slept, by proxy, and only on film, with Doris Day and most of her immediate family. 

But it all just seems so unfair somehow. Once you have fucked the entire tinseltown A-list shouldn’t that exempt you from ever having to wait for public transit on a bitter cold night in an oil rich city while Tom Selleck sits in a warm expensive Italian restaurant trying to avoid eye contact with the delusional freak at the bus stop who keeps pressing his nose up against the window?  I really don’t know, and to use a popular phrase of the day - I’m just saying…