Night of the Queens

one queen squeels as the other retreats,
flings a drink after him overhand,
baptizing the bystanders, making a scene
the two apparently need to create:

some hissy diva-drama, obscure and public.
And i'm soaked. Even my socks ( a last minute gift
from L, at the airport, saying take care of 
yourself, meaning I can't say this,

I can hardly stand this) and suddenly
I'm standing in a bog. what am i
supposed to do? do i squeel too?I
don't owe them that. Do i laugh benignly,

as if this whole embarassing buisness
were funny, were my idea of fun?
do i smile knowingly( the older man,
wiser and gentler, in expensive shoes)?

Or suck in my belly and scowl (yes daddy)?
Or stick out my belly and yell at some kid
(please master) as if he were to blame for it?
None of these options feel like freedom, exactally.

the flannel-plaids and sleeveless vests
settle for a shrug, a side-long chuckle,
a manlier grip on their beer bottles
...and the tide subsides.  Two college sweatshirts

boogy in place, locating each other
by echo. I'm getting too old for this.
I know why L needs it- the practice,
the disco, the visual fick of desire,

the shock of being wanted: becasue it is difficult
and possible; because a young gay man
needs to be given, over and over permission
to need; because he is handsome and he feels

darkly that somehow this affects his life,
not yet that beauty like his is a gift
to console him for his youth. He is young
and will be hurt, and hurt others, in time.

- because having grown up in this culture
a man has passed the standard social rites
and needs to return, to do it right
the second round, to learn the rules of pleasure

and honesty, party- behaviour  and sweet
repression, as a queer and decent man.
It's a funny buisness, this sex thing,
so thorough and so incomplete. The queens

Are dancing now, shirtless, rolling their waists,
and thiers solitude is terrifing. They enact
something more rooted than politics,
or privacy:that we are people an "us",

a community...but of what? shared need? can
such affection matter, if we offer it
beyond persons- to any hunky trick,
 or to men collectively, or to some man

lucky particular, who summerizes
for the moment what one seems to want
for the moment, for the empty weekend?
is this display itself a kind of tie?

an icon of raw want? A community,
what is that? Do i mean a collection
 of the brave and the needy, of whom
these feral dancing boys,

posing and turning in the hard music,
are our ambassador, shamans,poets?
Maybe i'd explain it that way to some judge
whos tood beyond the threshhold of the subject.

This scrimmage of allegiance and resistance,
i wonder how it differs from any other
citizenship a grown man chooses. these are
my people. We danced together into the camps.

And yet we embarrass me, and squeel,
and pour your beer in my favorite socks. These years,
anyone can die of misjudged sex;
we know, we all

know. Am\nd know too a man can wear away
from solitude: no one is immune.
How can I be too proud to be here,
when i feel the same urgency

that moves them, dancing? Shocked by joy, to see
in the torque of that long boy's waist the same
white turning as L's. his torso, when he winds
a towel around himself, so pure it sears me.

The Symetry of it: we are one body and are
each apart. Though wheather this lurching fugue
of sex and its pulses are the effect
 or the fact of the lonliness, curse

or the first cure, whether this dancing
exposing thier waists can make them happy
(as i am for the moment, lifting happy),
who am i to say for them? i can say

we are a people, whatever that signifies
in language or in longing. or in belonging
exactally through this pulse and its common
 motions. or through this saying. obliquely

for us all. The queens are lofting, angelic
now. The t-shirt with the kind moustache
has asked the skinny overalls to dance
(as he hoped there shyly, glancing);

Big Daddy (even his cigar is leather) is buzzing
over the boy in the wire-rimmed glasses,
they sway as the sinuous music passes
through them, they are discussing

insect-images of sexuality in Proust....We
are one body; we lift and embarrass me-
and i'm grateful, I realize, may be
for that most of all-: we amuse me,

in the implausable surprise
of being here...though it's getting loud
in this blue cellar; it's late, it's packed; the crowd
is turning younger, and the hot smoke burns my eyes.



this was written after coming home from my very last night at the clubs...i have come to the realization that im too old to go clubbing now...thisng dont get going till after midnight and im ready to go home and go to bed at midnight...and by the way ..there is no L...it was jsut a fictional character...