Hurricane Homo

There’s a scream

inside of me,

borne from a frustration that none of this is enough:

not enough men love me,

not enough weight on the bar,

my poetry isn’t published,

I’m the concubine of capitalism,

I’m bored with this mundanity,

and despite all that

I still wonder, while I’m cumming,

when I’ll stop wondering what I look like

when I’m cumming.

I mean, let me be my mouth,

let me be hideous,

let me be unlovable,

let me be a gut and a scar and

let me scream this scar and

wrap like a scarf this scar

around my face,

I mean my scarred face

I mean my pretty face

I mean this face that heteros yearn to hate;

I don’t use the word straight

because it implies a state

of moral rightness, it implies I’m bent

and that this queerness,

this queerness that was given

without consent,

isn’t actually a gift I own, and now

I represent

the voice of dissent

straight out of the 90’s,

I mean the 80’s,

when I wanted to be She-Ra or anyone

in a dress and heels and long blonde hair,

and I still want to be that bitch in heels,

that girl that gets saved by

the muscle- and leather-bound hero.

Sometimes I feel like a relic from a time

when the only gays on TV were panned away from

when they kissed, yet still

I rewound that Melrose Place tape a hundred

or a thousand times,

and I jerked off to any bare chest,

to any underwear ad,

errant nipple,

hairy leg,

men’s cologne on a T-shirt,

MTV Spring Break,

Brody on Baywatch,

all while still trying to date girls,

and by date I mean hang out and talk

about Brad Pitt and gossip

about boys in our class

while the scream built in my chest

like a pneumonia of self-flagellation.

And how did they not know?

Maybe they did.

Maybe they just felt safe,

maybe I gave them the inch of space

with a man that I was craving

for myself.