Marriage - Its a Dirty Little Secret Elizabeth and I taxied down
to City Hall to get married
Last year my mother eloped
with Howard to Key West.
I hear through the grapevine
my brother Stu is set to marry
Anne whom Ive never met.My sister Amy married Jerry
at a cult ceremony in Kansas
along with 499 other couples.
My other brother Lewis and Steve
had their picture in the paper
as they waited in line to be the first
gay couple to legally conjoin in NYC.
Please Dont Die Yet On the back
of the cereal box
It says to be continuedThe cat jumps
up on the breakfast table
The crooked painting beckons
Like your next loverThe light bulb pops
the toaster crackles
the phone just wont shut up
All over there is everything
While here sit you still
As the hole
in the metal eyepatch
Doctors wear on elastic bands
Round their foreheadsWhen I was five, I made my mother promise
To put a teeny tiny headstone on my grave
The easier to push it off
And come back to you
For My Friends in San Francisco Its a bbbird, a plane, its poetry. Shadow
of a bird passing over a crowd demonstrating
we all grow old. Fly on! Our placardsare poems too, aiming voices at the International
Hotel. It is 1977. It is a basic human right.
Shelter. These actions so rightcant be contained, become history. A body
placing itself, step step, in the path
of power that kills. Kills itself.We must accept our successes as what they
were. How lost can we be, inside
each other. So many heads we live in, to go onliving. Sun shines through moon, seasons
slide. To you, my friends, boots and hats, pants and
socks, shirts after shirts, as our dailiness dies.
Featured in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Bob Holman recently organized the United States of Poetry TV Special on PBS.
He directs, if that's the word, the Nuyorican poets.
© 1996, The Blue Penny Quarterly. All rights reserved.
