Surgery

So now, just suppose that someone wanted to know
if faggots are men—a fair question.
Would I then trot out all the masculinists I have known
who are homosexual
and show how they did and do and will oppress women and
are certainly male supremacist, no less than I,
or should that be no more?—which is not even to speak
of hideous straight men with their most of the most.
And then should I apologize
about how long we've existed and haven't had any
consciousness to speak of
but have allowed them to kill Oscar Wilde with that longdrawnout torture
from which he died
and have allowed them to keep on using J. Edgar Hoover against us
without anyone's avenging that suffering life from
the death-brain they clamped over him as a child,
not to speak of Hart Crane, and here fill in your long
list of faggots murdered by the hatred of straight men,
and how Andy Warhol can make millions only by
showing how disgusting faggots are.
If he showed anything else—how beautiful, how usual, how human—
no dough.
No, faggots aren't not men. It's just that they
tried to cut something out of us very early on,
and sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed,
and they have counted ever since on the quarrel that got set up
between those they damaged and those who escaped what they meant
to do (whatever other damages got done escaping that one).
And I care so much about the part of me they wanted to kill
that I will risk any death to continue cherishing that part—
listen how it sings along in forbidden music and poetry,
listen how it sings inside a man when, stroking another man's brow,
he even experiments with meaning it for a full minute.
When they came with their knife, I lied as sincerely as I knew how,
saying Oh yes, I do hate girls and dolls and singing and picking
flowers and drawings and dancing,
and they went away and didn't cut that out of me,
although they beat me up every time
they caught it ulping out of me afterwards.
I don't really want this body or any other,
I don't know who I might hope could hold my hand and
walk half a block with me without needing to say anything.
But if it isn't you, my fellow faggot hearing or reading this, then
I'm in a bad way, because faggots are men, or else they'd have killed
and who else am I to share that knowledge with
if not you? Learning to love
in each other The Other no other way.
And I want to have that taste in my mouth before they catch me
and lock me
away (sanatorium/crematorium): my own warm
blood welling up arrogant and fanatic from having told
the last unutterable truth about how I know they've already failed
and are going to die and how all that will be left afterwards
will be wild gigantic whorls of purple-green fingerpaint colors
dancing as though to an effeminist etude,
my very atoms indestructibly subversive
of everything they did to me.
The only way they might have succeeded is if
they could have cut out of my body
the whole universe infolded there under amnion like
a bud or a tumor.
No wonder they failed.
They wouldn't even know what the universe looks like, much
less how to spell it.
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