Nightly,towards twelve
When the room with its confining walls
And wreaths of smoke within
Can not be borne,
Your car--increasingly geriatric--
Will carry us non-the-less
To a collection of outposts,
Little would-be worlds,
With their own customs,mores,
Their native costumes--
Ranging from jockstraps
To feathered boas--
Their denizens
With their secret agendas,
Their satellites
Spinning in the haze
And as mortality rates
In avant-garde circles prove high,
It is all the more astonishing
On such beclouded nights
To run across this or that
Old nemesis or ally
In from Paris or L.A.
Some metaphysical circus ramp
Landing them here
Among transvestites,
To cult membership confined
X., with whom I've locked horns
On the periphery
Of more scenes than I can classify
Is not dead after all,
As reported but sports
A new incarnation
As an entrepeneur
On a side street
Which will surely grow chic
Now that he's here,
Here to summon his minions
From the four quarters
And control the mindwaves
Of those whom fashion has made mad.
His nails are well-manicured
Which once were bitten
To the quick over a boy
Whose name he's forgotten,
I remember him, too,
On the barricades of the 'sixties
Who now affects
A diacritical deconstruction
Of a tuxedo from Milan
As casual wear..
He has taken a shine
To my companion, little Tito,
Who will slash his own wrists
Six months hence
Our gossip--
Concerning whose parental chateau
Has been blown to smithereens,
Or what shard of glass
Was put in whose ballet slipper
At what premiere,
Of who tattoo'd himself where
Etcetera,
Is what we secretly rue.
That our period of decadence
"Begun at birth"
May seem self -indulgent
To some (perhaps you,
the reader I otherwise court)
I quite understand.
That self destruction
Is de rigeur when Utopias fail
And millenia end without rapture
You may not comprehend.
That X. once put daisies
In rifle-barrels aimed at him
And believed that rock n roll
Would crack the gates of Eden open wide
Seems incredible to me, as well
In a realm of beauty besotted with death.
Tito--who I suspect
of mixing downers with alcohol--
has grown lugubrious
cataloging those of his acquaintance
Who have O'D on heroin
Or crystal meth,
Died in gang-wars
Or thanks in one case
To auto-erotic axphixiation misfired,
In another to S and M
Prolonged to excess,
Not longer a game.
This plainly bores X.
who has heard it each season since '66
When he hung out with Warhol.
It makes him, indeed,
Positively reptilian--with ennui?
(Or does he foresee
The unsanguinary scene
In the bathtub?
I will wonder, later,
Recalling what he says next:)
"That girl over there
In the black leather halter top
And leather garters
Is neither a girl or a guy.
If you think you are lonely,
meet Michelle, a hermaphrodite
With residual male genitals,
You wouldn't exactly call it a dick
Said Bobby,
To whom she gave VD .
I won't forget
The first time I heard him --or her--
Her voice a low ghostly alto
Exactly between him and her
--Not campy at all
Like a drag queen's
But recognizable in an instant
Because the hairs on your neck
Stood upward
And you felt you were about to remember
A bad dream that you'd forgotten.
It was unique but not a Eunuch's
(And I have met some in Egypt)
Though naturally
It brought to mind
That old Victrola recording
Of the last surviving castrato
Made in 1905
"The last time I saw her
Was in DC
When she wept in a gutter
Having been kicked out
Of the lesbian caucus
And before that,
The Black Panthers
--She severely disturbed Bobby Seale--
Also the Gay Activist Alliance
--There had been scenes
on the stairs of the Winter Palace--
The Womyns group loathed her
--she had hit on some sister
in a horrid male way
At a symposium on clitoral massage.
In short, she'd been kicked out
On her polymorphous perverse ass
From every coalition or caucus
Which ever existed,
A freak among freaks.
If she can survive, so can you."
(illustrations:portraits of John Rothermell and David Brinzenhofe by Peter Hujar)
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