For You And Your Warped Reflection

for you and your warped reflection

On being gay (a poem I regret writing for class)

I am afraid someone will know. I am afraid they will smell the rotten thing in my mouth, on my hands, between my legs.

I'd like to proclaim this rotting growth is dying under bigotry and insults. But I grew around hatred, leaving a hollow shape that looks like kids carrying signs they can't read, holidays for mass I get dirty looks at, "sodomite" the worst thing to be called. My parched broken pieces embrace all too eagerly the sweet poison that smells like cow shit and magnolia.

"What have you done to my little girl", the sentence hovers, unsaid, the knife that is yet to be thrown, that already left a hole in my stomach. "What have you done to my little girl," dad, I'm going back to Ithaca.

Beyond the sea are the best part of me, the haircuts head in the bathtub that stinks of cheap dye and the tattoos I wanted when I was eleven. Behind the sea it's New York in 86.

It's unfurnished apartments, empty cupboards. It's glitter and luxury just a five fingers discount away, envy like ice cube in the spine, anger towards all the honest people who don't convert prices into week-worth-of-groceries. It's sewing in a makeshift workshop when you don't know how to sew, under the careful guidance of a makeshift mother. It's the teeth, the biting, the original sin behind the masks of decency. It's ambition, desperate, relentless, bloody.

I see it, my Ithaca, on a stage in Marseille, and in Arial 12, black and white, on a flimsy piece of paper ; someone saw a man love someone like me and thought,

"This love needs glitter, warm lights and electric guitars."

This poem deserves a steady voice, precise gestures and a perfect mastery that gives an air of clumsiness. It is so sincere, so raw, that tenderness, it needs a ballet of smokes and lights.

Jean Genet loved Abdallah Bentaga and it's like a broken raft in my odyssey. Because I too am a painted creature obsessed with my own spectacle, and when Jean loves Abdallah, it's like he loved me too.

Even if we need makeup to conquer the unthinkable, the grotesque of what we are. Even if our Venus got murdered on a moldy mattress in a cheap motel ; on stage, in front of a full audience, an old man almost touches an adonis. Even if a man lays with a man the way one lays with a woman, they both did something terrible. Even if we are out too late at night, we go home bruised or we don't go home ; on stage, in front of a full audience, an old man almost touches an adonis.

But maybe we are wrong and they are right to try to save us. Maybe God is real and he hates me. Maybe there is something profoundly treacherous and vile inside of me. Maybe I will have regrets and admit that Oh wasn't Troy that much better? Wasn't there in this time of bloodshed, some kind of comfort? Oh the honors, oh the glory!

But there is Philippe Torreton, at night, in the theater, under warm lights and glitter showers. And holy shit how hot are we, we the faggots, when we love each other on stage. How fabulous for a man to love an artist, how tender, for a man to love a boy trying to kill himself.

I recognized Ithaca when I picked my name. I disown her every time I introduce myself.

"Antharès? Where is that from? Is it greek?"

I answer well actually ehm basically it's it's a star in ehm a constellation and ehm well it shines brighter than the others.

Anthares, it's Trans, actually. Just like Noah, Aiden, Eliott, Alex, Sacha, Ariadne and Jasmine. To the mean laughter waiting to happen, that's the answer. It's trans, and when I picked it it was meant to be obvious. To tell the whole world, fuck the tides, fuck election day, fuck the groundswells, I'm going back to Ithaca.

Not as Captain, but as a half baked writer not old enough to be a fuck up yet, in all the the stain of my obsessive perfectionism, my obsessive ambition, my obsessive pessimism. In all the forbiddance of what happens in my bedroom.

I count the coins of my entertainer's allowance that I put in kraft envelopes for the black priest that will mutilate the divine feminine off of my body. And all of Ithaca's ghosts count with me. They smell of dirty streets and hospitals, they are made of glitter and seafoam. If they send me to hell I'll suck Lucifer's dick like it's the body of Christ and I'll know if angels are circumcised.

Michelangelo saw David in a marble cube, and he saw me too like I was always there. I sculpt the curve of my shoulders with a needle, the flat of my chest with a kitchen knife. I learn my voice and how I smell. I learn with the sweet words of the poets how you say sweet words to a man when you are a man. From boys I learn to be a boy, how to behave and what to say ; what is a man on stage on what do I need to do to be applauded.

I make myself with powders and push ups and birthday presents a body Argos will recognize. I was always there, like the flour before the bread, like the grapes before the wine, like the mud before the home. I am Pygmalion. I am Galatea. My hands are the divine creation. I am going back to Ithaca.

I have been running to you since my first step

I have been kissing you since my first kiss

My Ithaca