The Wilde Boyz

The Wilde Boyz
__________________

“The play between art and
desire is always in the air”
—The New York Times

Sugar Daddy Alert!!!—
Miss Wilde has returned!
Miss Rimbaud is back in!

Jizzy Jersey Visigoths!!!—
They’re taking over the
New York poetry scene!

So much for SUNY—
Poet Laureates get yawns
Str8t poets aren’t ready!

Boyish bon vivant—
Sullen Leonardo DiCaprio
Swishes in from Total Eclipse!

The Wilde Boyz love him—
Miss Verlaine’s at the door
But they won’t let her in!

Poems for The Wilde Boyz

Poems for the Wilde Boyz
___________________________

The Crucifix
Radiance
Orizaba
His Ribs
The Underwear
Thru the Keyhole
Self Portrait as Bette Davis in Contempt
Despite Yolanda
The Vampire’s Lover
_______________________

The Crucifix
—for Alex Dimitrov

he didn’t come easy—
it was more like an awful
excruciating crucifixion

sometimes it would—
get twisted around his
neck and he’d choke

not as much as me—
gagging and trying to
keep communion down

after unzipping him—
letting him nail me to
the ceiling with it

then him playing—
lazarus & me raising
him from the dead

Radiance
—for Alex Dimitrov

even tho his eyes—
were brown at night they’d
ooze deepest lavender

i wondered if he were—
seeing what i was seeing
but he’d squeeze them shut

i had pry them open—
with a crowbar just to see
the flame that turned me on

Orizaba
—for Alex Dimitrov

below deck the kid—
who Hart Crane wanted
rebuffed him & beat him up

once was enough—
the kid took the gringo’s
money begrudgingly

but crane was drunk—
the stop in havana only
made things worse

he ended up broke—
a black eye, no billfold
in trouble as usual

how could be show up—
back in new york this way
even peggy hated him

his eyes pea-green—
color of caribbean sharks
sailor-poet overboard

he used to sing songs—
before he let his lips touch
the mud far below

His Ribs
—for Alex Dimitrov

when it was over—
i let it slide thru me like
snot from a runny nose

he stained the sheets—
kept on trembling until
there wasn’t a drop left

he let go of my head—
fingers wrapped tight in my
hair, a pube in my teeth

The Underwear
—for Alex Dimitrov

at 14 i’d seen him naked—
my cute young stepfather who
my mother had got married to

she couldn’t stand my father—
and he couldn’t stand her so
that’s how i ended up in love

he kept his rubbers in the—
upper left-hand drawer of my
mother’s dressingroom cabinent

they’d get drunk on sat nights—
then make love when they got
home, i pretended to be asleep

i snapped the waistband—
of his dirty shorts and smelled
what a young man smells like

i pressed my face into it—
pretended he was fucking me in
the mouth, tasting his smegma

i sank my teeth into the cotton—
biting deep into the man i wanted bad
the terror & pleasure of cuming dirty

my knees gave in, i went spaz—
all i wanted was what mother got
he knew but wouldn’t let me have it

Thru the Keyhole
—for Alex Dimitrov

watching him thru—
the keyhole i couldn’t help it
but i had to do it anyway

knowing he was getting it—
his exquisitely muscular
tight sneaky flexed ass

my mommy dearest—
getting him off each night
in their crummy bedroom

so that’s how it was—
in our dumpy duplex home
they fucked all the time

that’s the problem—
when you fall in love with
your own hetero stepfather

I was stupid and naïve—
thinking maybe I could get
some of that str8t guy stuff

he was so self-centered tho—
so awfully vain and completely
selfish & so was my mother

all she was interested in—
was the same thing i was
ogling at thru the keyhole

he was in love with himself—
she was in love with it even
worse than he was

i was in love with it too—
even finding him jerking
off in the shower sometimes

Self Portrait as Bette Davis
in Contempt
—for Alex Dimitrov

it’s easy for bette—
to be bitter in the movies
she’s my favorite actress.

especially baby jane—
when she serves blanche
dead parakeet under glass

she makes curtains sway—
the red light district scream
jesus christ, what a dump!

she’s got my number—
she knows all about eve and
even more about slutty adam

Despite Yolanda
—for Alex Dimitrov

before he comes—
he always says her name
i simply can’t take it

it drives me crazy—
hearing another person’s
name coming outta him

especially yolanda—
and it takes a long time
for him to say it too

but i want it bad—
his cum at its richest that
first moment it shoots

i need something hot—
and alive to get me going
thru the rest of the day

The Vampire’s Lover

he had an hour without it—
two sharp incisors aching for it
inside his straitjacketed mind

the heart’s black pool—
a balkan curse expiring in the air
waking up nobody

his coffin sliding into—
an invisible crypt in a castle
built for the living dead

manhattan his new home—
so easy moving through the city
most of the people dead anyway

undressing beside the piano—
elegant and unmistakably old
his mouth that never releases

a faint circle of blood—
some teeth marks in my shirt
like he said it wouldn’t hurt

Fashion Poetry Festival

Fashion Poetry Festival
__________________

“Wilde Boys, a roving salon
for self-described queer poets”
—Patrick Huguenin, “The Wilde
Boys Salon, for Poetry or Maybe
a Hot Date,” Style and Fashion,
The New York Times 11/2/2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/fashion/rhyme-or-reason-alex-dimitrovs-wilde-boys-salon-for-poetry-or-maybe-a-hot-date.html?_r=3&ref=style

The Fashion in Poetry Festival is proud to present a special edition of Wilde Boys, an intoxicating exploration of costume and fashion as a form of poetic spectacle throughout the modern gay NYC poetry scene.

The program highlights those episodes in New York City which most distinctly foreground costume, adornment, and styling as vehicles of sensuous pleasure and poetic enchantment.

New fashionable underground poets like Anne Howe, Alex Dimitrov, Kenneth Dingwanger, Jack Smooch, Jose Rodriguez-Lorca, and Stanley Kowalski constitute one such episode. Their exquisitely decadent, highly stylized visions full of lyrical fascination with style, fashion, jewelry, textures, layers, luxurious fabrics, and make-up unlock the opulence of earlier periods of popular poetry, especially “spectacle” Weimar cabaret performances of the 1930s with such stylish fashions & exotica as Marlene Dietrich doing “Voodoo Love” in tres chic young apeboy nightclub drag in the exquisitely infamous “Blonde Venus” (1932).

The program forges a link with the characteristic visual intensity of Frank O’Hara’s New York School from the ancient 1950s poetics with its rather naïve, cosmopolitan, pre-Aids, dreamlike, sexy, marvelous world of risqué bars & Fire Island beaches of death. In O'Hara's magical and sometimes phantasmagorical tableaux, costume and artifice was more than just simply for cruising and display.

Instead, the new gay Fashion Poetics dazzles, seduces, surprises, and dramatically metamorphoses—into a new type of special effect. Boys of Paradise delves into the archives to show that costume and adornment have often been a key component in chic American poetics and has, from early on, proved absolutely vital in showcasing such basic properties as voice, movement, change, light and, of course, color.

Stressing the aesthetic aspects of fashion poetry, the program suggests one way of closing the cleavage (or at least temporarily suspending the opposition) between str8t avant-garde poetics and gay commercial poetry. This is very much in the spirit of such progressive journals as the pre-war French Cinéa-Ciné pour tous and the post-war American Film Culture, and of course, it’s this very attitude of experimental poetics & filmmakers collaborating in the YouTube future that has publishers entranced, now that all the chain-bookstores are folding because of the rather rude Miss Gutenberg Internet Revolution.

The Fashion Poetry Festival took place in Paris and its next venue will be at the Museum of the Moving Image and The Graduate Center, CUNY this April and May, followed by a symposium with screenings at Yale University in November.

Practicing

The New York Times

Practicing
________________

—for Marie Howe & Alex Dimitrov

i’m sick of love poems—
for boyz and girls that i
kissed in seventh grade

songs of furtive blowjobs—
in crummy basement gyms
hymns to stupid str8t jocks

the gay avant garde is dead—
post-aids poetics is about as
pretty as a syphilis ward

fuck the new york times—
sticking poetry into the
style and fashion section

fuck the new york times—
dishing hart crane down by
the docks the fleet’s in honey!

fuck the new yorker—
for making gay poetry more
heteroflexible for breeders

my generation’s had it—
paunchy john ashbery and
shell-shocked edmund white

miss bidart, miss doty—
squeezing into that makeshift
greenwich village salon

cocktails, handsome waiters—
shrimp on skewers, salmon in
cucumber cups, what’s your type?

“honey, times new roman—
that’s my type,” a 20-something
poet smirks fifth avenue chic

poetry salon parlor tastefully—
furnished with books, midcentury
modern chairs, a jay davis

anne howe drones on—
linda’s basement like a boat
with booths and portholes

gloria’s father owns a bar—
downstairs with spinning stools
& young sailorboys in heat

practicing, practicing—
that’s all we did was practice
until we grew up and screwed

Denise Kelly, “Practicing” from
What the Dead Do. Copyright
© 2012 by Denise Kelly
Reprinted by permission of
Going Down on Moses, Inc.

The Dinge Stain

The Dinge Stain
__________________

The Dinge Stain
Stained Lover Boy
The Other Stain
Black Silk
Classics Professor
Steena’s Kid
____________________

The Dinge Stain

“I wonder what he does
after he swallows me whole”
—Philip Roth, The Human Stain

everybody knew—
except coleman silk
about the stain now

he was the last one—
to find out the dinge
truth afterwards

what the writer—
nathan zuckerman
had found out

steena be pregnant—
with coleman’s own kid
she didn’t tell him tho

Stained Lover Boy

steena didn’t tell him—
even after saying goodbye
that night on the train

after he took her—
back home to meet his
proud black mother

steena had cried—
on the train afterwards
she couldn’t take it

they broke up—
she didn’t tell him tho
that she be pregnant

The Other Stain

it was shocking—
when it all came out
a gay black professor

big city university—
esteemed all-whitey
faculty, of course

that’s the truth—
coleman was queer
as well as dinge

the kid in bed—
wasn’t just a cute trick
he be steena’s son

Black Silk

the black widow—
of upper class passing
opened many doors

now they were all—
slammed shut and
coleman knew it

he couldn’t say—
shame on you, zuckerman
the real shame was his

his sirk make-believe—
imitation of life was over
his double-life exposed

Classics Professor

“why didn’t she—
tell me, steena, that
she & I had a son?”

the kid smirked—
“she didn’t tell you
cause she be ashamed.”

a classic tragedy—
right outta oedipus rex
incestuous male love

a closeted black man—
a secret dinge lover
his own son in bed…

Steena’s Kid

goodlooking, charming kid—
sexy stunning built youngman
a boxer physique like him

a body everybody fell for—
both men & women wanted it
green eyes, long dark lashes

eighteen years old—
a college freshman who
wasn’t ashamed of dinge

coleman tasted it—
steena’s son inside him
he wanted some more

Size Queen Blues

Size Queen Blues
__________________

Georgina
Georgina to Denise
Wasted
Getting Her Man
Solitaire
Permanent
Blonde Venus
Georgina
_________________

Georgina

“a man of my own?”
—John Wieners, “To H,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

she likes saturday nights—
when he comes over to
her place when his tacky
girlfriend don’t put out

she gets him good—
all the way from pukey
poughkeepsie down to
his zimbabwe zulu zone

he sits on her couch—
smoking some weed
using her ears like a
pair of BMW handlebars

Georgina to Denise

”smelt, felt and heard”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
Letter to Demeny (1871)

…gay poets such losers—
compared with georgina
who loves being engorged

he likes lotsa meat on—
his chicks dontchaknow
especially around the ass

georgina simply loves it—
how a man smells, feels
and gets fucked up good

Wasted

“where veins run blue”
—John Wieners, “Waste,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

poetry a noble art—
comes from well hung sons
georgina be a sizequeen

thick arteries, pulmonary—
pulsing velvet black penises
she’s a slut for dirty dicks

she owns lotsa stock in—
trojan inc company for sure
smell of burning rubbers

Getting Her Man

“contraction of desire”
—John Wieners, “Waste,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

sex be more than just—
continuum of pussy pulsing
feminine phenomenology

just ask miss georgina—
doing the shocking down-low
on his twelve inch schlong

it’s the dignity of triviality—
getting close to the way
a guy really loses it nice

Solitaire

“make a sentence”
—John Wieners, “Solitaire,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

she never stole nothing—
only a young man’s orgasm
dragging it outta him

georgina never hurt a guy—
except making him cross-eyed
half-blind, a cripple for life

she never would share him—
even tho she’d been my only
true friend & fag-hag for life

Permanent

“all beauty dies”
—John Wieners, “Permanent,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

he’s big and beautiful—
especially on saturday nights
with georgina in bed

he’s so young and vain—
he can last all night long
how she holds on tight

it’s bittersweet though—
her knowing his need will
someday persist elsewhere

Blonde Venus

“male-oriented”
—John Wieners, “Women,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

funny how he can conspire—
alone to return the glamour and
excitement out of the tedious

georgina doing apparently—
even monotonous tasks around
him has this smile on her face

as if she were marlene dietrich—
doing that “blonde venus” scene
“hot voodoo” in the nightclub

Georgina

“smoking and
drinking the wine”
—John Wieners, “Eila,”
Cultural Affairs in Boston

beautiful face—
face of the goddess
aphrodite

pale pearly-rose lips—
delicate little tongue-tip
giving him a rim-job

his turn to dangle—
his legs way up in the air
his toes all twisty

Black Creole

Composition by Ernest Ignon

Black Creole
_______________

Black Creole
Miss Rimbaud
Enough
The Bengal
The Past-Time
The Silent One
The Queen
Rebirth
Exile
Losing It
Angels Lite
______________

Black Creole

“the shriveled olive
and flute-strokes—
the heavenly candy”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Sonnet of the Asshole,”
Album Zutique

black creole kid—
descendent of rimbaud
french kiss squirt

vieux carré verlaine—
hypocritical reluctant
broke sugar daddy

catholic priests—
another bayou scandal
black creole chicken

Miss Rimbaud

“King of the niggers”
(roi de nègres)
—Edmund White,
Rimbaud: The Double
Life of a Rebel

je est un autre—
he’s something else
coupling my lips

rude intercourse—
creamy squirting praline
sticky masculinity

wrinkled budding—
prepuce gently dribbles
all worn out by love

Enough

“Seen enough”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Departure,” Illuminations

seen enough—
his vision possessed
many haughty airs

had enough—
rainy London and
always his pouting

known enough—
about his sluttish
ardennes asshole

The Bengal

“very sturdy rogues”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Side Show,” Illuminations

several have already—
exploited her bedroom
and vague virginity

truly overly ripe—
burlesque horsing-around
cruel struts so endowed

endowed with young—
theatrical buffooneries
except at the very end

The Past-Time

“savage side show”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Side Show,” Illuminations

mostly hottentots—
gypsies, simpletons
and bestial harelips

caught up after-game—
romantic dancing and
the usual str8t comedy

clowning around until—
closing time, that’s when
she picks up cute dregs

The Silent One

“the idol, black eyes”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Childhood,” Illuminations

he was bored—
she picked him up after
a movie at the varsity

she could feel him—
his juicy sluice gates
oozing outta his shorts

sewers of sapphires—
he was a master of silence
and then she rimmed him

A Queen

“the hour of desire
and gratification”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Tale,” Illuminations

a queen was vexed—
having devoted herself
to ordinary perfection

rough trade numbers—
were the only thing left
everything else tawdry

dominatrix endgame—
found her hanging in
the closet with a smile

Rebirth

“an amorous new body”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Beauteous Being,”
Illuminations

she got him in bed—
his bedroom eyes and
adorable freshman body

it shuddered and—
started hissing obscenely
rearing up erectly

the snake of love—
shedding its foreskin
its pink amorous head

Exile

“an exile here”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Lives,” Illuminations

she’s dedicated—
to a new torment
it’s playing with her

the somber air—
and bleak cityscape
very depressing

yet this mood—
feeds her dreadful
skepticism nicely

Losing It

“appalling fanfare”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Morning of Drunkenness,”
Illuminations

oh my gawd—
he’s beautiful when
he goes so spastic

the cum in his vein—
such a shock of lewd
lost enchantments

it ends with a—
certain disgusting
lack of elegance

Angels Lite

“angels of flame
and of ice”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“Morning of Drunkenness,”
Illuminations

a certain loathing—
on the part of slaves
to other indiscretions

some think that—
it’s a sort of uncouth
gauche boorishness

but when he gives—
her the black ice then
devil angels sing…