Sometimes She Turns Up in Murderers

https://youtu.be/M7oPAqnDv0g

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Sometimes she turns up in murderers — and when

fascist flags are unfurled, she’s often the impulse

in those who salute the enflaming pursuit of the flag

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and its world — she’s the final accoutrement to which

the psyche must turn for its laws. She is, in a word,

the cause. After packing its foolscap and foibles

.

and folderol into its factory — gotten itself into gear —

only then will a Conscience decide to appear, and her

brand is the one that will most avail; she makes all

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the stodgy ones pale. No other conscience can do what

she can to our inward allegiances, male, trans or female –

that is, can release her containing companion from

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leasing its life to the tedious labor of moral behavior.

She thinks a conscience is nonsense. She makes you

the lone one at bat. No other conscience does that.

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She is what gives you the leave to do anything you

want to do. Sometimes it aligns with the sociopathic.

At others it hovers and spins to the center of what is

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exactly true. She’ll have left all of that up to you. She’ll

have gone elsewhere to play. Pinning a note to the door

of your heart: “Have a day full of dangerous volupté.”

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What Happened When the Whirligig and Calvin Kissed

https://youtu.be/6MWHZwoBIXg

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Somewhere in the other world,

which Calvin daily visited

to do his morning exercises,

strengthening and stretching

his great lengthy limbs, he looked

around, while leaning back, to see

a twirling up of coiling tender

threads and slender lines attain

.

the height appropriate to meet

his eyes, and suddenly the whirligig

and Calvin knew that they were

destined to be lovers. In the other

world you don’t need any covers

to protect you from the eyes

of passersby – indeed the other

world encourages the overt act.

.

And so, without the need for tact,

they tangled up in public in bright

yellow light: and caused a new

inimitable fact to come to pass:

a hybrid knot of linearity and mass

the likes of which no creature

either here or in the other world

would ever have predicted to exist.

.

So that’s what happened when

the whirligig and Calvin kissed.

By now, though, they’re a yawn.

The other world and we await

the dawn of something newly

aberrant: even if, as with

the whirligig and Calvin, we

won’t stay interested for long.

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An End

https://youtu.be/rmzGtX8BrMc

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Primal light, dark flame –

something other than a heart

beats in his frame –

something more than life

.

contaminates and animates.

We see A lead to B to C

and on to Z in him but

some enigma branches out

.

and casts a spell: the code

bodes neither ill nor well, but

hints at something swelling

out of sight. Everything is

.

obvious, he says, and we agree

that everything about him

is quite obviously hidden,

unlike anything we know

.

or think or see, enough

to keep us furiously alert,

and curious. Obliquely,

in the dark, he winnows us

.

through corridors and brings

us to a door through which

he tells us is the view.

But something stops us, then,

.

from walking through.

But he’ll walk through.

That won’t bring the end,

but it will bring an end to you.  

.

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Quentin Crisp, My Brother Bob, Los Angeles and Me

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Lately when I wake up in the morning in my magical home on east 2nd street in New York and find myself (as usual) seeing what anyone would first be likely to see waking up in my bed – the floor-to-ceiling bookcase facing it – I've been prodded, as if by nearly 3 years of passive subliminal indoctrination (I moved here March 21, 2016), to actually look at the books in the bookcase, which has prodded further interest in looking at the books that surround my head in my bedroom and fill some of the lower walls of my studio and have their place as well in the living room, not to mention the Jewish Library (Richard's domain).

.

There's an effin' lotta books around here. And you know what? It turns out many of them are splendidly interesting. And I'm finding that I actually want to read many of them. Some of course I've read already, but not nearly as many as the hubris of displaying what are supposedly 'my' books (as if I'd read them all) might suggest. I actually don't read a lot these days. But it turns out that even looking at a book I did once know well can have salutary effects.

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I was about to say salutary nostalgic effects, but I'm not a fan of nostalgia, which to me seems to invite wallowing "in a time gone by," as Quentin Crisp would say. I have no desire to resurrect the past. But reflecting on it, as my mention of Quentin Crisp indicates I'm doing at the moment, can make for some truly nourishing  thought and remembrance. The book I just came upon for the first time in ages which occasions this piece, the Advocate's capacious compendium "Long Road to Freedom" about the evolution and history of gay rights in this country, was published in 1994, and edited by Mark Thompson, who with Malcolm Boyd (the same name as of someone I went to high school with!), his lover (the term we'd have used in the '70s), were two of my brother Bob Kettelhack's closest friends.

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Mark was a well-known editor and writer one of whose subjects embraced the spiritual aspects of the gay male leather community and the meaning of the sex they had (Mark had been a Radical Faerie, which with this made an intriguing mix), and Malcolm was a sort of renegade Episcopal priest (as was my brother) and activist, first known for his book "Are You Running With Me, Jesus?" amid numerous other subsequent titles, whose parish was in Santa Monica but who lived in a wonderfully leafy secret L.A. lair - you descended a staircase through the thick fecundity of Southern Californian flora and vines to reach their home below the street (you half-expected to meet Tarzan aka Johnny Weissmuller).  Bob had moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and was smitten with it instantly. He loved L.A. the way I love NYC. Everything about it regaled and amazed him: weather, birds, trees, flowers, the Hollywood glitz, even the incessant driving -- the whole vibrant newness of it. I remember, visiting him for the first time in 1982 (the pic of us sitting on his couch in the bungalow he shared with his lover Jack in Mount Washington dates from then), being taken by him to the top of Griffith Park so to see the panoply of the city below us (cue James Mason showing Judy Garland a similar view in A Star is Born). "Here it is!" he said excitedly, sweeping his hand across the horizon. "Here what is?" I replied, mystified: to me it mostly looked like Sunrise Highway with palm trees. But he saw a paradise. And through his eyes, I began to see it too.

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We forward to 1982 in New York when I began working first as assistant, then as agent and writer, to literary agent Connie Clausen at Connie Clausen Associates, which since about the year before, had taken on Quentin Crisp as a client. (Connie had seen him perform his show, marched backstage at the end of it and informed him she was to be his New York agent. "I want what you want," Quentin probably replied. They were a fascinating combo.) Meeting him was like my brother meeting L.A.: he was an inexplicable marvel. Most of you know of my 17 year-long association with Quentin as a co-writer, agent and friend. But not many know that only a few months after I plunged into the Clausen Universe, and effectively as another agent handling Quentin, I arranged with my brother (who excitedly tugged at me to do it) to allow him and his cohorts in L.A. to give Quentin a welcoming party in Beverly Hills (my brother, through Jack, knew some interesting peeps in the town, among them Vincent Price, Carol Burnett and Jean Stapleton) when Quentin next appeared in the city with his "An Evening with Quentin Crisp." By all accounts, this party went swimmingly - indeed was held next to a colonnaded swimming pool in the luxurious patio and gardens of a grand house belonging to I cannot recall whom, with a view of all the creation that mattered from the top of one of Beverly Hills' hills. Quentin was so taken by the party that glimpses of it got into his writing about L.A. - which you'll have to take on faith, because I can't (after a quick Google search) find any QC quote about L.A. besides "Los Angeles is just New York lying down." It probably got into one of his books. But he described his evening there with an awe-struck wit: the swimming pool and the columns and the sense that he'd reached at least a minor pinnacle of Olympus, which is what he considered Hollywood to be.

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The memory of the success of this party, marking the single instance that connected my brother and Quentin and me (by the way, they liked each other enormously), comes back in a glance at Mark Thompson's "Long Road" and the piece I wrote about Quentin which appeared in it, which Mark hired me to write. It was featured as if it had been an Advocate article in 1979 (actually I didn't meet Quentin until 1982), but if you won't tell anybody I won't. Bob died of AIDS in 1989, Connie Clausen died in 1997, Quentin in 1999, Malcolm Boyd in 2015, and Mark Thompson in 2016. Though this may not amount to much of a tale to tell about how each of our lives crossed in L.A., cross happily they did, and oh, how glad I am that I can claim the tale as part of my improbable life.

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Seven Things I Thought I Knew Fifteen Years Ago

https://youtu.be/5STZnAAkgWY

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(but first, whom is that a drawing of, or don’t we need to know?)

.

1

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Everything a sentient human being does or is

depends on making manifest inchoate fizz.

.

And then unutterability transmutes into new mass:

with strange autonomy you hold the dark at bay –

see your hand is in the form, is part of it, at last –

and find your prints illuminate and mark the clay.

.

2

.

Go to Mass, observe the angel eyes around you

swerve, evade, retreat then peek out, press against

impenetrable corneas – like starving children

at a Christmas window, locked out, looking in.
.
Milton's Satan is the Midnight

Cowboy of the human soul:

He wants to taste each part of you,

he wants to eat you whole.

.

He wants you in his bed for pay,

wherein you hear him pant
he longs to give his heart away

(he thinks) to you, and can't.

.

3

.

To banish doubt we grew up learning

that we had to peel and parcel out

our feelings and our thoughts,

like oranges, into discrete

segmented parts – taught

that hearts were comprehensible

if we divided them syllabically with But’s.

.

But this is nuts.

.

The only worthwhile art is opening

and offering a hand. The central

alchemy of anything is And.

.

4

.

Sometimes you have to rhyme
and tap a healing meter,
beating out in careful time
your chaos. Find some neater
.
means of caging feeling
so it offers the illusion
of behaving. When I'm reeling
I hang onto form. Confusion
.
needs a bridge across its sea,
a span of words for order –
strict words make a milder me –
so I can cross the border.

.

5

.

I found the means to make

my fingers and my bow obey

my ear, and swoon,

by concentrating on a tune –

not disembodied black marks

.

on a sheet. To me, if you

can't find a way to play

a piece without consulting

something central in your heart –

to learn and ground technique

.

by making love – whatever you

create will be illimitably weak.

Run somewhere, not in place.

Give aimed and passionate

experience a shot at grace.

.

6

.

Soul squirms involuntarily:

I sit with it, forget it’s there –

it burrows down contrarily

then surfaces for air –

.

and prods me to enjoin

my heart to tell me what I think –

then floods from brain to groin

in answer – takes me to a brink

.

of unsuspected hearing, seeing

(when getting old is all I’ve done).

Then like some subterranean being

breaking through to sun

.

the odd thing worms up – blundering –

hellbent on being free –

and pops! – abruptly, wondering

how else to get to me.

.

7

.

I don't believe in innocence
as commonly portrayed -
the notion that we're all clean slates
at birth is retrograde to me:

we enter life uploaded

.
with a universe of stuff: genetic
baggage – temperaments, magnetic

pulls; splenetic – some of us;

and others - easy, light; we cart out

personalities full-blown –

.

fixed palettes offered up, whose

hues paint infancy in unmistakable

designs. By two, we're Machiavellian –

we learn to throw our weight around –

a tonic impudence intoxicated

.

by the thrill of saying "no."
Seems truer that our innocence

is earned: opposite to what we're told,
the task of growing up's to shed
inherited impediments that make us

.

sink back into infantile jaded ruts.

We work to learn to bring ourselves

a fresh sanguinity: to scrub out

stubborn stains, and find –

create – our real virginity.

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