"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
Comments on this blog are moderated. Anonymous comments will not be accepted. Please include your full name and a valid email address. Comments that fail to engage respectfully with the arguments on this blog, or create a hostile environment for other participants, will be deleted, and their authors may be blocked from the site.
According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
My poem "Bullies in Love" has just won the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize judged by Charity Burns and Linda Bierds. Anderbo is a NYC-based online literary journal edited by Rick Rofihe. This poem was inspired by the episode of "Glee" where the homophobic football player kisses sweet little gayboy Kurt. Who says watching TV doesn't pay?
Bullies in Love
Wouldn’t it be nice to believe all hate is desire,
the bullet that wings the bird
wanting to be a bird?
Believe, if little dead boys can
hold their dear opinions in the ground,
that the fist is only a heart
stunned by too much muscle?
Because then you would still be visible,
chosen as carefully for destruction
as the cities of the plain
or the shy girl in a vampire novel,
the girl who is all elbows and sorrow
and stands outside at weddings.
The truth is, most hatred is different from really rough sex,
neither masked for the sizzle of mystery
nor screaming the name of the defeated, its own.
Not thinking is its flavor.
Deafness, its spice.
But believe, because you are not yet twenty-one
and drowning, not yet lying down at seventeen
beneath the homecoming train, not yet a choking thirteen
hung from your mother’s garage ceiling,
because you are still at home on prom night
watching the Discovery Channel, you will be convinced
that the zebras, by now, must be aware of the cameras
and that the one who tumbles beneath the lion’s
rank delicious weight is choosing
something like the mating that escaped you.
