Elderly Fags in the Castro

THE CASTRO

The greatest expectation—

I suppose is that surely things

Will get better & better

After all, my dears—

DADT, DOMA & ENDA were

Successfully adjudicated 

And yet in The Castro—

The very Heart of our

Gay Push for Equality

The real estate creeps—

Are pushing out the Fags

For Silicon Valley Straights

Our Elderly SF citizens—

There in the Castro District

Usurped insidiously now

Harvey Milk would’ve—

Been driven out of business

Does the Castro have pride?

Faulkner and Polk

FAULKNER AND POLK

“There is a blank spot

right in the middle of

where my memory

ought to be”—Noel Polk

OUTSIDE THE SOUTHERN MYTH 

Polk and Picayune—

They’re like anti-memoirs

For me back in the South

I’m not a character—

In these pages and yet

I’m writing about it

Noel Polk & Faulkner—

As well as living down

There in the Deep South

They’re both dead now—

All I have left is memories

Reading them at LSU

There in Allen Hall—

ABSALOM, ABSALOM 

Me as queer Quentin

Faulkner knew me—

 Polk too way back then

In the Viet Nam Sixties

Yoknapatawpha yanked—

Me outta the gay Closet

Deep South Lit saved me

Uranian Vagabondage

URANIAN VAGABONDAGE 

“His Eminency says that you

may publish these naïve and

almost Dantesque and

sometimes quite Homeresque

fragments” —Frederick William Rolfe

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER

I suppose my dears—

There’s nothing quite worse

Than Uranian vagabondage

Being a Born-Again Fag—

The object of gay derision

By the Queenly Pantheon

Feasting with Panthers—

Precociously Pater-esque 

In this Wildean wilderness

Like Baron Corfu’s—

Weirding of the Wanderer

Daring debutante once again

LETTER FROM VENICE

“Let it be known that I

was called in an age yet

to come Nicholas Crabbe

the Impossible”—Frederick 

William Rolfe, THE WEIRD 

OF THE WANDERER

How else to deal—

With the Slings and Arrows

Outrageous Fortune dishes out

Tableau vivants—

Venice delectations

Aschenbach’s laments

Boss Cupid Venice—

Androgynous Theater

Fag Film Noir Flick

Miss Auden says—

“Naughty, naughty

What would Mother say?”

REINCARNATION RAKE

“For I penetrated into 

the occult arcana”

—Frederick William Rolfe

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER

Was it Sebastian Melmoth—

Or perhaps Sebastian Nabokov

Who gave me some advice?

The Vassar novelist—

Had read CHICKEN (1979)

Back in graduate school

“The Last Uranian”—

He signed his lovely novel

Now in my tall bookshelves

I do feel rather somewhat—

Ancient being a Uranian again

A Reincarnated Rake

ASCHENBACH-ESQUE

“to commune with

long-dead sages”

—Frederick William Rolfe

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER

What’s worse, my dear—

Being a born-again Uranian

Or one for the first time?

Surely DEATH IN VENICE—

Is only one way to go there

Languishing in a beach-chair

Or pretending to be a Borgia—

Or a new Vatican Pope like

Miss Baron Corfu pretended?

I simply can’t really decide—

A closeted Aschenbach, a Borgia

Or perhaps a new Vatican Pope?

QUEER QUAGMIRES

“enduring unmentioned

and unthought-of anguish”

—Frederick William Rolfe

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER

Doodles and ditherings—

Fin de siècle fantasies

Tres rococo-esque, my dear

And yet what else—

Can I possibly do now

Daring descent and decline?

Lavish literary genres—

Decaying like human beings

English especially susceptible 

Why just the other day—

Detoured by some dithering delirious 

Diphthongs into a queer quagmire!!!

Pizza Slut

PIZZA DELIVERY BOY

“The sky was uniformly grey”

—Alan Hollingshurst,

THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY

The sky was dreary-deary dinge—

So tres tragically depressingly

Without any sign of sunshine—

Breaking thru the cloudy frippery 

The sun had migrated south—

Surely to never return again

What I needed was a quickie—

A delicious douche of the divine

Rather than dawdle away the—

Tawdry gnarly overcast day

So I did what I usually do—

I phoned for some Thai takeout

Something sweet and sour—

And then if that wasn’t enough

I’d call the delivery boy—

The Pizza Slut Kid for relief

Pope Hadrian VII

POPE HADRIAN VII

“the usual loungers 

and pleasure seekers”

—Frederick Rolfe, 

Baron Corvo, Pope Hadrian VII

I was hardly disappointed, my dears—

After Pope Benedict XVI abdicated

And the Vatican didn’t choose me—

To be St. Peter’s new Vivacious Vicar 

But it’s not I who had lost the Vatican—

It’s the Vatican who had lost me, my dear

So when the Cardinals slank up to me—

I civilly shooed them from my gondola 

I raised my drawbridge and told them—

I was beyond parleys from the heights

Never anymore would I seek them out—

Those stuttering little Chrysostom priests

With their Mad Hatter insane tiaras—

Right out of ALICE IN WONDERLAND

I had my own Temple of the Holy Ghost—

My muscular young Venice gondolier

I’d rescued Zildo from an earthquake—

After that we sailed the Adriatic Sea

The Desire and Pursuit

THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE HOLE: A ROMANCE OF MODERN VENICE 

“Truth is tarter than taradiddles;

and nothing is tarter, terser, than 

truth on the track of tired trash 

in a trance.”—Frederick Rolfe, 

Baron Corvo, The Desire and 

Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance 

of Modern Venice 

I brushed aside the accumulation of—

Cigarette-ash from my smoking jacket

Picking up a copy of the NYTimes—

Reading once again the news from Rome

The NYTimes is a kind of subterfuge for—

Readers excluded from a view of the facts

It said much but signified nothing—

Hoodwinking, indulging in imagination

Reading between the lines one can sense—

A tale of unparalleled ghastliness opening

“How exquisitely horrible it is,” I said—

Something mysterious was happening

The Creepazoids were taking over—

Cretinism and idiocy on the upswing

Mobs of lower class child idiots were—

Swamping and infesting the schools

People were manifesting defective things—

Like some abortion of the mind, lower IQ’s

These lower classes of idiots were like—

Altogether beneath the animal world

They possessed not taste, smell, hearing—

Sight or touch, they were human imbeciles

Their degenerated brains couldn’t fathom—

The simplest syntax or pleasing dictions

Simple words like “cagotism,” “latebrose”—

“dedecorous,” “physidoyls,” “vexilla,” “amoenely” 

“Succursale” and the verb “ostends”—

Were simply beyond their feeble child idiocy 

Actually though some of my best friends—

Are child idiot gondoliers down here in Venice

I prefer them that way, my dear, for obvious—

And tell-tale reasons I shan’t get into now

Other than to say that my favorite gondolier—

Drinks only wine and plies a mean oar

Not that I’m a whore about rough trade—

But it’s such a refreshing change when

Compared with my miserable egotistical—

Tres gay muse consumed with ambition

Hadrian-esque pubic curls so entrancing—

His back, loins and shoulders so strong…

Miss Hadrian the Divine

MISS HADRIAN THE DIVINE

I was tres tired, simply worn out—

After years and years of trashy

Hope deferred, loneliness and the

Awful pain of unrewarded gay toil

I took everything as nothing more—

Than a personal miserable affront

I was no stranger to mental fatigue—

But corporeal anguish was simply

Much too much for my delicate ego—

The horror of all the world’s creepazoids

I tried to write but dazed by a tacky—

Torrent of ideas I’d find myself dizzy

Meandering in a maze of words to—

The point of sheer utter exhaustion

I’d lose the thread of an argument—

My pen remaining immobile for hours

Sitting here in my low armchair with—

Its shabby brocade, dull-mauve & green

My capacity for writing lovely poetry—

Is being constricted by the times

Old legitimate monarchies are rather—

Everywhere declining & so am I, my dear