An Invisible Man II

Picasso Mask Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

An Invisible Man II
—for Coleman Dowell
__________________

What can I say that—
I haven’t already said
About this Birthmark
Of mine that I’ve had
To live with all the time
Since I was a kid?

I wasn’t particularly—A homosexual Exhibitionist Showing off at the YMCA I didn’t have much—Trouble getting a blowjob When I needed it though In the showers—In the sauna & steam bath When I needed it bad I got propositioned—By all sorts of older men Intrigued with my birthmark

It added a certain aura—
Of forbidden love to the
Usual tricks at the Y

I had pasty white skin—Some of the guyz thought I was a pink-eyed albino Instead of just a plain—Vanilla white guy who just Happened to be different Things got different tho—My freshman year at LSU When I lived in the dorm My roommate caught me—Beating off after class one Afternoon in bed once

Once, maybe twice—
Actually a lot of times
College made me nervous

It was in the mid-Sixties—And Integration was slowly Happening on campus It started off real slow—With 15 black guys there On academic scholarships Later of course—Half the football team Was like African-American But in 1965 LSU—Was still pretty much Deeply segregated They even closed—The Huey P. Long Pool To keep it that way

“There’s nothing wrong—
With a country where a
Negro can own a Cadillac.”

That’s was this esteemed—And well-known tenured History full professor said. I looked around class—Everybody was nodding their Heads all so very knowingly It made me nervous—Because my roommate Was joking with me “Is you white or black?”—he’d say to me coming back to the dorm early I’d be masturbating—My big 10-inch piece of Dinge Birthmark meat…Naturally word got—Around the dormitory Floor about my condition Most of the guyz—Just shrugged sayin that Integration was “in” now I got cruised a lot—In the showers like back In the high school gym

Some of the guyz—
Wanted to see it all the
Way and suck me off

Business majors—Gave me money and Engineers measured it My sophomore year—I moved off campus to The Tiger Town ghetto By then I was smoking—Weed and getting to know My better half—my dick Black guyz were putting—The hit on me and checking Me out real good in bed It was the best—Of both worlds and I got Turned on by Literature

Faulkner was the only—
Writer back then who wrote
Dinge Lit like a professional

Absalom, Absalom—The Sound & The Fury and Popeye’s Sanctuary Half of me was Bon—Bon the Beautiful Sutpen Who went to Ole Miss Getting revenge for—His Haitian exiled mother Eulalia of the Big Easy Ending up in bed—With his own half-brother Henry Sutpen the fag

With Quentin Compson—
Seancing his way back to
Those Plantation days

Those days & nights—When Going Down on Moses Entered the Ledgers Brotherly love mixed—With incestuous miscegeny Right up my alley