The male poet overcompensates
With poems of unbridled bravado,
Giving unwanted details of
Disemboweling a deer with
Bare handed desperation.
He counts his sexual conquests
With disquiet and undue clarity,
Each sweaty fumble declared
Victory over inadequacy and
Untold performance anxiety.
Somebody once called him queer
And set him on a course of
Toxic masculinity, but the
Voice that haunted him most—
That he couldn’t escape—was poetry.
R Horton
The knocking of the bamboo
In the wind
Restores my awareness.
Su Dongpo said he could live
Without meat but not without bamboo.
Bamboo brings life, of course,
As meat destroys it, but
Dongpo had a different
Understanding (he loved eating meat),
Yet his words weave
Through the leaves
With warning and assurance
Of life whose end has not
Arrived so long as bamboo
Sways her promise to us.
I’ve seen you enveloped in passion
Entranced and wandering aimlessly
In all consuming lust as you fold
Into taut skin stretched over
A well-tuned bicep shimmering
With the sweat of ones who
Would possess you,
Confiscate your love,
Loyalty, lust, passion, devotion,
Breasts, lips, thighs,
And even your new mountain bike.
I’ve seen you capitulate to complete
Sexual abandon and forget
Your past, your future, and your
Unpaid mortgage. On some
Occasions, you switched from
Lover to lover in your bed
Like a child trying different
Ice creams at the shop with
So many flavours.
I’ve seen you soak the sheets,
Draw blood with your nails,
And shriek till the rafters shook.
You took it all in,
You put it all out.
You forgot who you were.
You looked through me,
Past me, beyond me.
You forgot I existed,
And when you remembered,
You laughed.
You laughed.
Then you shouted.
I had no business blocking
Your way to paradise.
I had no reason to be in your way.
But as you stroke my back,
I open my eyes,
And remember why I came.
Jan hadn’t slept much. Like, for the past three days she hadn’t slept, but she was about to crash. Like hitting a wall or something. She was coming down because the speed was just about done, and she was sort of looking forward to the crash. How could you blame her? This is how she planned her weeks, you know. Speed on test days. Pot on weekends. Beer for dancing, mostly. Or just because boys like it.
The problem was that Bobby was sort of revved up, because that’s just how he is. He just gets all this nervous energy and then just talks and talks and talks. Philosophy, politics, music, love and loss. Bobby wasn’t into drugs and really had no clue about drug etiquette or even just the parameters around what drug users might be going through. Some people found him rather inconsiderate.
And Jan kept telling him she was really tired, but he really didn’t feel like being alone at that particular moment, and he didn’t want to stop talking. She thought sex might have done the trick, because guys notoriously fall asleep right after, but Bobby was a hard-core insomniac, even if sex was calming, it wasn’t enough to settle his nerves.
So this went on awhile—until she passed out, and Bobby was left staring through the screen on the window and counting the moths on the outside. He was thinking of Carson McCullers and Frankie in “Member of the Wedding.”
Somehow Bobby related to Frankie, though it would seem unlikely that he would. He just liked the way this little butch girl looked out the window and pondered the “irony of fate” for the insects out there. And he thought a lot about the irony of fate, and sometimes he felt like a little butch girl stuck out in the country just wanting to fit in at a wedding or something.
Jan was dead to the world, but Bobby checked to be sure she was alive in her drug-enforced slumber before he stepped out into the steaming evening air. After a moment of regret for forgetting mosquito spray, he set off toward Old Main, hoping Mary might be up there again, because she never slept well either.
Randall Horton
If you’re looking for info on insomnia, Mattress Battle put together some stats.
As friends solemnly told him to call
On them if ever he needed anything,
Only his pastor was candid enough
To tell him Jesus alone would stay.
And so it was as it had always been,
Walking alone on the beach, in town,
Along the highway, and in the upstairs
Hallway with no memory of being carried.
He supposed Jesus was a faithful companion,
But a bit quiet, and not much help when
A flat needs fixing. He’s someone you can
Always talk to, but feedback is lacking.
And why should Jesus be different from the
Others? Why would the Son of God care
That he was lonely? Why would he look
For Divinity in the deep pools of loss?
Randall Horton
You’ve been all over the world,
But you’ll never know where I’ve been.
The lonely street in this lonely town
Took me to hell and back again
If you’re lost in Legget, Texas
You must be broke down
Cause there’s only one road
In this ol’ one-horse town
You’ve seen more things than I will ever know.
And you’ve done things I’ve only dreamt about.
But my heart’s a path well trod.
The things I’ve seen make me want to black out.
You can find my family if you look
In the cemetery behind the church.
But you don’t want a complete history,
So I think you should just end this search
This town always had a story
That most are too afraid to tell.
Don’t ask too many questions
Or you might meet me in Hell.
If you’re lost in Legget, Texas
You must be broke down
Cause there’s only one road
In this ol’ one-horse town
Randall Horton
You may think it’s blank—
Or even free—
Verse, but you may be
Unfamiliar with the voice,
The accent, the dialect
Of the author.
You don’t see the rhyme
If you pronounce things
Differently. And you may miss
The meter, if you speak with
A different cadence.
Randall Horton
XII
Being deaf isolates you from people. From hearing people, anyway. That’s true, obviously, but sometimes deaf people forget they aren’t actually alone. A deaf couple was chatting amiably, well, maybe amorously is the better term, as Doug was eating lunch in a Luby’s Restaurant.
If you’ve ever eaten in a Luby’s, you’d be surprised to learn of anyone feeling amorous or frisky there, because it just isn’t that kind of place. Something about standing in line and holding a tray with a bunch of retirees quells any rising sap, if you know what I mean.
Still this couple was chatting away and working up a bit of lather. Sometimes even a Luby’s can’t dampen the heat of young love, or lust or whatever. So these two were talking about each other’s bodies and what they planned to do with various body parts when then got home or maybe even to the car.
To be perfectly honest, many sexual signs in American Sign Language (ASL) are graphic enough that even most hearing folks can make them out with a little effort, but Doug didn’t need to make any effort. He was deaf and quite fluent in both sexuality and ASL. He was alone and bored in a Luby’s, so watching an erotic conversation a couple of tables away didn’t seem like too bad a way to spend a few minutes.
Now, hearing people tend to stare at deaf people in public. Some are being rude. Some are being judgmental. Some are trying to see if they can understand any signs. Some are just confused. And some probably don’t even realize they are staring. Anyway, this deaf couple wasn’t surprised to see someone watching them talk.
They decided to check it out and signed a couple of questions to Doug to see if he understood anything. For his part, he thought the prudent thing to do would be to pretend to be hearing. When they signed to him, he just looked confused and shrugged his shoulders. Feeling relieved, they sort of waved him off and went back to their conversation. He gave them the hearing sign for “OK,” and all seemed well.
And it would have been fine, too, except a hearing acquaintance of Doug’s happened in at about that time. It wasn’t an amazing coincidence or anything—this acquaintance just worked across the street. Anyway, he knew that he and Doug would be at an event later in the week and signed, “Hey, how are you? I’ll see you Thursday, right?”
Doug blushed. The couple blushed. And for reasons he didn’t understand, the acquaintance blushed.
Randall Horton
XI
The FedEx delivery driver was a little aggressive. I mean she acted like delivering our packages was keeping her from the really important tasks on her list, but we all sort of thought delivering our packages should be the important task on her list, but most of us were too timid to actually say so. In fact, we were pretty deferent.
Except Imogen.
Imogen said, “She might talk to you that way, but she’s not going to try it with me, because I know where she stays. I know where her Daddy goes to church, and I know where she went to school. No sir, she’s not going to come in here talking to me about being stressed.
“Stressed? Black people may have worries that put them in the ground, but they don’t talk about being stressed. ‘Stressed’ is how white people talk, and Black people only talk about stress when they’re talking to white people.
“Make nothing of it. She’ll do what she has to do, and I’ll do what I have to do, and we’ll get our documents on time every day, and everybody will get along just fine.”
And Imogen was right, more or less, as we didn’t have any more big problems in our office. We developed a mutual if grudging respect with our delivery driver, until she was suddenly replaced by a young man that the ladies in office obviously found preferable for reasons I won’t go into.
We heard something about our former driver leaving some pretty important boxes on a loading dock over at the law school without getting any signatures. Someone seemed to think it wasn’t a good idea to leave legal documents unaccounted for, so we got this nice new young man who looked like he knew how to handle all kinds of boxes, or at least that’s what the ladies said.
Randall Horton
After the first date,
She asked if he knew of Gestalt.
He said he only knew tiny bits
But he felt his mind gave him
The whole picture.
He asked if she had read Hegel.
She insisted that she had not,
And they were both amazed
To have discovered such
Compatibility through
Chance encounters.
Randall Horton