News From the Front

My secret hands
and my secret desires
can fill a theater
and entertain all the young whores
dressed for a fuck.

My heels make a click,
click.

Oh, comely nights.
in my head
about how to walk,
talk
and I don't mean
there's many causalities

I mean there's no end to the causalities.

Like Batman and the Joker,
the tedious madness
of two minds
that inhabit the same body,

the city,

fat as my psychiatric file.

There is no winner, and no
bomb, nor
truce,
a countless counting
of coups,

a shredded nightgown,
a worn dress,
scrubbed skin
of those who hands mark secret work.


Let's be honest:
I'd love to burn down
like the skirt on the floosie
in the back of the club,

how it turns to ash as she dances
to the music.
By the end of her night

the whore
will wear nothing but a slur and a smile,
her high heels snapped
from all the broken hearts she's tramping.

To the Crossdresser at 20

Thank god for Prozac. Went cold for the better part of two weeks and kinda had an anxiety, well...shit...I guess... a gigantic expunging of neurotransmitters that had been pent up for so long....whew...anyhoo...back to normal operating levels...Happy National Poetry Month...the woman at the party is me...or us...or the speaker's female self.


To the Crossdresser at Twenty


The sunlight on the left side of your face
makes you look so pretty,
your hair a golden aura,
your skinny legs in ragged jeans.

The guitar will come late
to the party,
as will children,
and the kind of sanity
one only thinks one has a handle on.

Relax,
you're prone to clenching
your muscles so tight
your teeth grind at night.
You have been given the gift to rebirth yourself.
I have minor regrets.
Make your parties wild,
and large, and include yourself
in your own plots
to help others.
A little self mending never hurts.

You will attend meetings.
You will keep scratching
to make more of a life
out of beer cans
and note pads
and the hidden cache of clothes
and so many stacks of books.

Don't neglect the girl
at the party,
she will carry you when you cannot carry anything
other than syllables and apologies,
they are like paper lanterns in your hands,
the light flickering through your fingers,
the shadows, like jailed men
lean and swing in the thick summer air.

April is National Poetry Month

Thanks for the response on the last poem. This one is a little darker. I'm trying to quit drinking and live healthier and that includes being more emotionally honest with myself and my wife.

I am currently reflecting on my sexual history and dysfunction and trying to just figure out me. Sometimes I find it so awful that I can't choose. Isn't gender supposed to be natural? Isn't our sexuality?

I don't know anything...



NEWS FROM THE FRONT:
A Crossdresser Contemplates GID & Guilt


My secret hands and my secret desires can fill a theater
and entertain all the young whores
dressed for a fuck.

My heels make a click,
click.


Oh, comely nights.

There's a holy war in my head
about how to walk,
talk
and I don't mean
there's many causalities

I mean there's no end to the causalities.

Like Batman and the Joker,
the tedious madness
of two minds
that inhabit the same body,

the city,

fat as my psychiatric file.

There is no winner, and no
bomb, nor
truce,
a countless counting
of coups,

a shredded nightgown,
a worn dress,
scrubbed skin
of those who hands mark secret work.


Let's be honest:
I'd love to burn down
like the skirt on the floosie
in the back of the club,

how it turns to ash as she dances
to the music.
By the end of her night

the whore
will wear nothing but a slur and a smile,
her high heels snapped
from all the broken hearts she's tramping.

draft: working title "A Few Notes About CrossDressing"

What binds me to the earth,
which is to say,
what binds me to my body,
are the tight straps
of the camisole and the bright flash of satin
against freshly shaved skin.

It feels not like a cheap thrill,
or the sexed up joy one affords the mad,
but rather
it is the feeling of newness,

like how a new car's steering wheel rides the palm
or how a new pair of shoes
and a crisp new haircut feel
in the rush of spring
and the bright A/C of summer.

This awareness
is the spirit enlarging and enlarging
and reaching beyond its airy walls,
a conjoining of elements.

I just found it pertinent you know,
just in case there were questions
if I am found in the rubble.

What I like:the spiritual imagery, though as a rule I avoid those tropes, very overused. I like some of the lazy meandering rhythm. Will get back to you on the ending

For National Poetry Month

Last year I was such a yapper in April. This year I've been laying low. I wrote this one for those gals who don't get to dress as much as they want/should do. Also to those who delayed transition for whatever reason.

Ciao.



Days when I'm too Spent to Pretend

It's holding
yr breath
for
a week,

the restriction keeping your frame in line
with what frames should look like:
boxy, perfect, regulated, plumb.

It's what the bitch
in the carpool mutters,
what the teens say in the halls,
the sun discoballing off glittered flower pots.

Why can't people love?

It's holding yr breath

for a week
before you can relax
into yr skin,
before you can calibrate your voice,
adjust gears

that move yr winged feet
through the halls of town.
It's new skin,

itching and itching
under Thursday's blistering noon.

And the body rejects,
the body
rejects,
the body reacts.
So tired,

so long,
so far away.
It's a day
you can ride with the top down,
in the snow,
without jacket,
all that muscle holding tension so still you smoke
with heat, even in the cold,
even with the ice packing into yr sockets
like glitter lashes.

Tension of other shape,
new mind.

Sleep cures not,
stress is too much,
transition, transmission, transgriot,
transtouch.

Cigarettes, Diet Coke,
bubble pop magazines and crush.

These are spells against death,
are spells
against sleep,
are spells,
hell's bells.

It is like holding yr breath for six days
without so much of a squeak
of breath,

this boxed heart, this boxed life.

Girls being Boys

The Changeling
Judith Ortiz Cofer

As a young girl
vying for my father's attention,
I invented a game that made him look up
from his reading and shake his head
as if both baffled and amused.

In my brother's closet, I'd change
into his dungarees -- the rough material
molding me into boy shape; hide
my long hair under an army helmet
he'd been given by Father, and emerge
transformed into the legendary Ché
of grown-up talk.

Strutting around the room,
I'd tell of life in the mountains,
of carnage and rivers of blood,
and of manly feasts with rum and music
to celebrate victories para la libertad.
He would listen with a smile
to my tales of battles and brotherhood
until Mother called us to dinner.

She was not amused
by my transformations, sternly forbidding me
from sitting down with them as a man.
She'd order me back to the dark cubicle
that smelled of adventure, to shed
my costume, to braid my hair furiously
with blind hands, and to return invisible,
as myself,
to the real world of her kitchen.

I am sick of being sick

Pneumonia is so sucky...


My feeble attempt at NPM...sorry to you bibliophiles...currently tracking down a Judith Ortiz poem about crossdressing, as well as a super trashy, drag camp epic Disneyland on Acid...yum




Untitled

Before I awoke
Work was simply work
And stress was simply
Stress, and now that I
Am awake, a bright
Penny in a chipped dish,
The work is settling into
My new skin
My mind a fresh red button.

National Poetry Month: Father's Old Blue Cardigan

Sorry for the lag...been stressed out as of late: busy on campus, youngest has pneumonia...it's enough to make a girl tear her hair. And since most of the household management stuff falls into my lap, my nerves have been fricasee as of late...

Anyway off to beautiful words...Trying to celebrate this April Poetry Month Thang by scouring the world for GLBT (mostly T) poems about gender fuckery. This poem encapsulates some of the feelings I had when I began dressing as a young lad...wondering what feelings would arise when I played my mother in her long mirror. Though the author's experience is a sad one, it is another example of the power of empathy that crossdressing can offer.


Father’s Old Blue Cardigan

By Anne Carson


Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.


I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.


I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.


His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.


He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon


but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip


on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers


over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

National Poetry Month: The Distant Moon

The Distant Moon
by Rafael Campo


I

Admitted to the hospital again.
The second bout of pneumocystis back
In January almost killed him; then,
He'd sworn to us he'd die at home. He baked
Us cookies, which the student wouldn't eat,
Before he left--the kitchen on 5A
Is small, but serviceable and neat.
He told me stories: Richard Gere was gay
And sleeping with a friend if his, and AIDS
Was an elaborate conspiracy
Effected by the government. He stayed
Four months. He lost his sight to CMV.

II

One day, I drew his blood, and while I did
He laughed, and said I was his girlfriend now,
His blood-brother. "Vampire-slut," he cried,
"You'll make me live forever!" Wrinkled brows
Were all I managed in reply. I know
I'm drowning in his blood, his purple blood.
I filled my seven tubes; the warmth was slow
To leave them, pressed inside my palm. I'm sad
Because he doesn't see my face. Because
I can't identify with him. I hate
The fact that he's my age, and that across
My skin he's there, my blood-brother, my mate.

III

He said I was too nice, and after all
If Jodie Foster was a lesbian,
Then doctors could be queer. Residual
Guilts tingled down my spine. "OK, I'm done,"
I said as I withdrew the needle from
His back, and pressed. The CSF was clear;
I never answered him. That spot was framed
In sterile, paper drapes. He was so near
Death, telling him seemed pointless. Then, he died.
Unrecognizable to anyone
But me, he left my needles deep inside
His joking heart. An autopsy was done.

IV

I'd read to him at night. His horoscope,
The New York Times, The Advocate;
Some lines by Richard Howard gave us hope.
A quiet hospital is infinite,
The polished, ice-white floors, the darkened halls
That lead to almost anywhere, to death
Or ghostly, lighted Coke machines. I call
To him one night, at home, asleep. His breath,
I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips
Had touched. I felt as though I'd touched a shrine.
Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse
Of concentration. In a mirror shines

The distant moon.

National Poetry Month: Maxine who was once Max

This poem was written by an aquaintance of mine, a fellow writer and psychology teacher, Scott Whitaker. I saw him read in December and he read this as well as few other gender related poems.

As usual trying to find GLBT realted writers or poems to celebrate National Poetry Month.


MAXINE WHO WAS ONCE MAX

What she has become is a bridge between.
O hormone, O facial cream, dream after dream after dream.
For her it is fingernail, warm belly, shaping with corset
What nature has given her into beauty, rather than the casket
Form she was born into; for the whalebone ship
Sets her bones true. Her heart speeds across
The figure in the mirror, returns and admires
The reflection that has come far from its pallor,
From brickyard and from country songs and docks,
Where she once held herself up to be no more than a fish
Swimming tight circles in a pool beyond touch.
She has given up her name for this. It has taken much.
There is no better feeling than this
Leaving one world and stepping into the next.



You can look at the T-shirt here.

National Poetry Month: The Toss

Cyrus is a nice man. Twice I met him and he was a courteous fellow. A fine poet. An openly gay poet, his poems appeal to a broad audience, and the poem below is a fine example of his work.


The Toss

Cyrus Cassells


I see a knife-grinder
On his dusty, stationary bicycle,
A black Star of David
Sprayed over a door,
As you urge me
Into the rationed light,
The crumbling pearl-grey
Of the ghetto.
All at once, the Roman spring,
With its galaxy of columns
And daisies,
Becomes the autumn of families
Plummeting from windows,
The desecrated autumn
Your mother tossed you,
Small bundle,
To a passerby.
Like this, you demonstrate
With a parcel.

But what can't be mimed
Is the look they shared,
The look that let you live;
Her toss that had to be
Quick, quick,
Before the cat-pounce Nazis came—
Out the shutters
Into the samaritan's intrepid arms:
Something unerring
Passing through the air
Of an iron universe—

As the knife-grinder pedals and pedals,
You whisper: I know nothing
Of what became of her.

Perhaps she soothed a boy
Born in the Lager,
Listless, mute, whose Lilliputian arm
Bore the tattoo of Auschwitz.
She would have coaxed him
To lift his intransigent eyes,
Knowing you might also be
Somewhere among the living.

And against the jackboot, the demolition,
For as long as she was able, she

A few lines about the mind transitioning

I hope you ladies are bored by my promotion of National Poetry Month. I do feel as a member of a marginalized community that we uphold those who advocate and express the feelings of our united experience. I've hit an energy level wall in terms of finding more TG themed poems. A break is coming up and I'll catch up...

As a semi professional writer I enjoy flexing my mental/imaginative muscles. These few lines are about my mental transitioning in a completely metaphorical/imagistic mode.

BTW Thanks for the comments and email...I appreciate it


Untitled: or a few lines about the mind's gender transition

A song drifts through a far away window.
The washline snaps in the breeze.

How dresses whip and curl like sharp Ps and Bs

and my mother is in the kitchen
and when I’m sure no one is looking
my hips and arms cock
and bend and arc
as if my body were

her hip and curve and hair

or
refracted light
a broken sunbeam shattered by a tall oak
at the edge of field
near a wood where only the birds know
the language.

I didn’t want to play house
but did anyway, and found I loved it as I loved baseball,
and playing family, too
with the dozy girl down the street.


And now I’m the dozy girl down the street
the song blaring now, as if from the next room
and I can see the ladies listening,
and smell the perfume,
the powder and cigarette smoke swirling in galaxies before me
and I swim in the them,
and the dresses
and hose
whip and curl,
whip and curl over my skin

and I am undone, and put back together
and I am both, and all, and nothing.

My body is enlarged by fresh clothes,
my mind as curvy as any soft body

as any soft touch.

National Poetry Month: from the Book of Awakenings

Whew! Getting challenging to find good GLBT themed poems for Poem a Day Nat. Poetry Month celebration.

Today's slice of verse should come with a lemon wedge and tea, or a dizzy glass of red wine.

An excerpt from The Book of Awakenings by Michael Mayo

Myself of long ago -
How does he get along
these days, I wonder?


I like it because it's so true for so many trans women.

Ciao! Kisses

National Poetry Month: Howl

Today to celebrate National Poetry Month is a link to Ginsberg's Howl. Which was the cool rant rave gay sexual political revolution poem of the 1950s, despite the fact the Ginsberg wrote it for a private audience. It's too long to post here. Read it elsewhere.

Ginsberg was interviewed by the Kinsey Foundation, and ushered in a new generation of homosexual artists in the New York, San Francisco, and Colorado scene.

National Poetry Month: The Factory

Because Sunday has forced me to be proto homme, I'm giving my head and heart a girly artsy party.

And because I'm too beat to hunt for TG themed poems...so I'm posting one of my own..written today for Nat Poet Mo...the girls mentioned, if you don't know, are TG

The Factory

How the films unspool and unspool
and fall like wet spaghetti at his feet,
his dainty feet…like they crawled off some Christmas elf
and got stranded on his stumps.

And Candy’s eats the air like a heavy hail coming ‘cross a field
and Joe and Holly and Jackie
crunch pills and silver pies
and everyone waits for a fat silence to spread,

but there is only gossip and pick-up lines
and endless soapy singing,
and thick branches of smoke,
and so many promises

and too many people loving all alone.
Soon the sun will swallow everyone up.
Where did the girls go? Where is the phone?
And who will clean all of this up?

And the parties end like they begin:
phone in the hand of a mirror man,
hot cigarettes on the lips of beautiful,
like wicks on rail yard dynamite sticks.

National Poetry Month: Exchanging Hats

Exchanging Hats


Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
--oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist

in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps
with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors hanging o'er the ear
so that the golden anchors drag,
--the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.

Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian's feather bonnet,
--perversities may aggravate

the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?

Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can't you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?

Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned-down brim.

Elizabeth Bishop

Yes, not too exciting. Note to interested readers: I will be posting face pics soon! Late June, mid-summer...I say this because my spouse is slowing coming around to giving me consent to express all my girlie self on this here porch...

Until then...


National Poetry Month--I'm going to try to write a poem a day this month. Alas I am already behind. To celebrate words, of course, and to transform, be beautiful, and be free!

Today:
IDK what this says about me, but since I learned of transsexuality when I was a young teen, and having experienced its many waves and purges and denials over the years, I have admired those who undergo a transition. What courage, what heart. O me, oh my, what lonely bones are placed under the moon…


Oh grant me the power to shed all maleness from my skin

--For those who have transitioned


Oh to shed my man
like cocoon shreds
my only wings smoke,
as it curls, curls, curls
towards nowhere,

only the ceiling keeps score.
My notebooks lie before me
and my new dress
like a pair of lips
cups to skin

and flesh’s biggest weakness
is the hole in the center of it’s face
that turns on itself
like the mad,
like the dead

and I want to eat the man
I have shed
and feel his hair
between my teeth
as I gnash, consume, and transform.



Note: takes a dark turn or two, but the TG experience is fraught with darkness, no matter how good you've got it. And I like the power the female has at the end to eat the evidence, to burn up all that was before and rise, rise, rise

National Poetry Month: Wedding Dress

A wonderful lyric--not exactly TG either, but a gender bender...
if only more people were open to playing with gender, and words...this world would be a happier place...

Wedding Dress by Michael Waters

That Halloween I wore your wedding dress,
our children spooked & wouldn’t speak for days.
I’d razored taut calves smooth, teased each blown tress,
then—lipsticked, mascaraed, & self-amazed—
shimmied like a starlet on the dance floor.
I’d never felt so sensual before—
Catholic schoolgirl & neighborhood whore.
In bed, dolled up, undone, we fantasized:
we clutched & fused, torn twins who’d been denied.
You were my shy groom. Love, I was your bride.

Buy the book here.

National Poetry Month: Homosexuality

According to his lovers, Frank loved to talk on the phone. Always chattering away about beauty, art, love, and gossip. Lots of it.


Homosexuality by Frank O'Hara (gay poet) is fab on many levels. Yes it is about gay cruising, but the line "it is the law of my own voice I shall investigate" is true for any trans person as it is for any gay person as it is for any straight person. And the end is true for anyone...to be wanted



Frank O'Hara "Homosexuality"


So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;

so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment

of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet

will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon."
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.

I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can

in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each

of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up

and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air

crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."