THE EXECUTIONER AND HIS SAVING GRACE
Yesterday I told my mother
not to feed the strays.
***
This morning the cats cornered
a bug beneath my feet,
ugly, long, multi-legged,
I intended to stomp it out quickly,
but it moved too fast and
out-maneuvered
our swooping claws, until
the mousetrap surface of my business card
laid in wait,
my glossy name ominous, my title
executioner,
our black-hooded patience soon rewarded, the felines
and I,
when at the moment the
paper guillotine was to come down
I abandoned thoughts of a hard-handed fold and
walked it gently to the backyard grass,
the cats disagree but
surely something that
fought to live so hard
deserves reprieve.
***
I am my mother’s son.
© Bryan Borland
DAVID
He’s divorced and remarried now, blue collared factory slave
in Mississippi somewhere, shackled to the second shift, daily
repetitive movements undoing history,
heat and grease replacing the smell
of freedom at sixteen,
of my bedroom in November, my parents off
chasing Rolling Stones.
He corrected me when I sang “bright red” instead
of “flat bed” Ford in “Take It Easy,”
said to treat it like a popsicle then
let me lay my head on his stomach
(most straight boys don’t).
So many men but he was the only one who
took the time to teach me.
We flirted often after that night but
circumstances never allowed me
in his classroom again.
I’d watch him communicate patiently with
his deaf younger brother, his rough hands
transformed through sign language,
these are my last memories of him.
I picture him now guiding the new guys on
how to operate the machines.
I picture them listening.
© Bryan Borland
PURPLE HEART II
He came to liberate your love
but after the white flag
was a year-long occupation,
a soldier’s ghost
with phantom valour
and your amputated heart.
© Bryan Borland
PURPLE HEART
He writes you now
after we’ve written him off
but remember
in a war of words
you’re a decorated veteran
and this time
it’s your battlefield.
© Bryan Borland
SHAM
She knew we’d never like him
with his aviator glasses and long limbs
and his record of identifying
with Republicans.
He didn’t fit
the criteria of what we wanted
her man to be,
but in truth,
he was never her man,
not like she was our girl,
not while he gave her things
disguised as affection,
not while we joked about
his last name and she spoke in terms
of absolutes and secrets,
not while penicillin
wouldn’t kill him
and he kept coming
back
in one form or another.
A lesson to apply
in instances of future beaus
and Lukes,
if you don’t think he deserves us
what makes you think
he deserves you?
© Bryan Borland
DESPLOME
Plane crashes are the new tornados,
the recurring modus operandi of my dreamtime disasters:
mechanical mayhem is the new wrath of nature,
the ground coming up is the new sky reaching down.
The tingling sensation of falling, oddly pleasurable fear,
a count, in Spanish,
veintisiete, veintiocho, veintinyeve and on
treinta,
fire and darkness galloping at me like
nightmare horses in some
demolition derby.
Thirty is the new zero.
Bracing for impact is the new waking before the crush.
Being dead is the new being alive.
In the nothingness I hear voices I don’t recognize,
Mexican angels but
I don’t speak the language.
Purgatory is the new 3 AM.
Resuscitation is the new wake up call.
Not knowing is the new knowing.
© Bryan Borland
SMOKE BREAKS by Bindo
I’ve returned from the beach It seems when one purchases dollar-store sunscreen, one might be wise to suspect it will only perform its advertised duty in random patches and will, in fact, work as tanning exhilarator on other parts of the body. I appear to be one of those sports fanatics who attends events shirtless and painted in the colors of his team. Shortly I will perform a Google search to investigate which sports team is represented by tan, pale white, chest hair, and sun-scorched red.
While relaxing and sipping cocktails of lime-infused gin and sand, I enjoyed immensely Bindo’s book of “very short stories” called, aptly, Smoke Breaks. I will admit to having a short attention span, hence my love of poetry. Bindo’s inclusions in Smoke Breaks were the perfect length, all under one thousand words, but all with full story-archs and raw, emotional depth. I’m not sure which were fact and which were fiction (which is part of the fun), but I could see these stories happening, as if Smoke Breaks is really the Gospel of Leigh Binder and I’m now one of his converts. In fact, after we arrived home last night, I briefly wondered What Would Bindo Do? before abandoning that line of thought and pouring myself a sand-free drink and admiring my unnaturally-colored body in the mirror. (Side note: I have now reached another milestone in my overall goal of becoming a poet, that being the status of raging alcoholic.)
Bottom line. When you finish Smoke Breaks, it’s like you’ve just made love to its author. You smell like cigarettes and you walk a little funny (and you kind of wonder if you have an STD – but you’ll visit WebMD later and self-diagnose, or just call MedicatedLady, who is apparently the expert on these things lately, the poor dear, though I can happily report that her what-nots and woo-ha are as clean as the waters of Mobile, Alabama).
If you’ve purchased Bindo’s book, check out “A Wal-Mart Rendezvous” – my personal favorite. If you haven’t purchased it, I think you should. Or at least visit Bindo’s blog.
I MADE LOVE
I made love
to the Gulf of Mexico,
a hundred thousand
drooling waves jumping
over themselves,
a hundred thousand
drooling men playing
leapfrog to reach me
with sea-slick fingers
and gravity,
weightless exhibitionist
on my hands and knees,
belly down at dawn,
paying no mind
to the voyeur with the camera
or the jogger who
pretends not to watch.
© Bryan Borland
ERIC
I was attracted to the way you smelled in
afterschool camouflage as we kneeled in
autumn fields of easy targets.
Six months and twelve days made you wiser,
your little brothers made you adored.
I turned blind eye when you kicked dogs,
when you turned bully and left bruises and
holes in the wall. Your whiskey-breath gave
me the craving to become predator,
crawling through the blankets just as we’d
crawled through mud to shoot arrows
at doe and fawn. This wasn’t me but
I learned from watching you.
Afterwards, I played dead against the
softness of your bed. Here you were clean,
toothpaste and soap having rid you of the
blood from your slaughter.
I wanted to kiss this part of you, to embrace
your innocence, but instead
there was no tenderness.
Your lust was carnal and you used
what I gave, my body, my dead brother’s
hunting bow and knives, skinning your game after
every kill.
You took what you could get, but then,
so did I.
© Bryan Borland
PRIDE SET
Miss California (new)
Arkadelphia (revised)
Rainbow Terror (revised)
Perfectly Normal (new)
To You Who Are Struggling (revised)
Also recently revised:
Of Bombs and Boys
Symbolically Untitled
MISS CALIFORNIA
Miss California
your mouth misfired and melted your crown,
Golden State Goddess tossed
from your throne and into the
mud, from coronation to common,
as average as us, let me cover you
with worthier titles.
How about
Miss Judge
our voice of vindication,
the cohesiveness of a community
unwilling to go silently into that lonely night,
not when we should have our
wives and husbands beside us.
How about
Miss Educated
on what makes a family,
on your belief that we aren’t meant to be because
the math does not add up,
but if you paid attention in arithmetic,
you would know that addition comes easier
than division.
How about
Miss Interpret
the concept of freedom, your idea that
we live in a land where the majority
can choose the rights of the minority,
but honey,
it’s not a choice.
Or how about simply
Carrie, the blond-haired girl
without sash or tiara, who
won’t forget us now, to whom I’ll introduce
myself as Bryan, to whom I’ll introduce
this handsome man as Christopher,
love of my life, and one day, Carrie,
our country will recognize him the same way I do,
and if you aren’t lucky enough to have what we have,
you’re sadly
Miss Ing’Out.
© Bryan Borland
PERFECTLY NORMAL
When her lips swell to extreme proportions
I tell her it’s perfectly normal -
perfectly normal in the context
of a severe allergic reaction,
but my words seem to comfort her.
When she takes her Ambien early
and calls me to say, slurring her words,
she’s watching infomercials
and parading about
in a t-shirt and high heels to strengthen her calves,
I tell her it’s
perfectly normal -
perfectly normal in the context of
sleeping medication
and a deep love of shoes.
When she tells me not to come
near her with a turkey baster,
that she is unsure about surrogacy,
that if we have a child she must be named
Maggie Apple,
I tell her it’s perfectly normal -
perfectly normal to name your children after fruit,
after all, the apple don’t fall far from the fruit tree.
When I came out to her,
she said she’d always thought we’d end up
together, that her grandmother had a quilt
ready to give to us as a wedding gift,
that when we’d visit her, we’d
just have to pretend because
she wanted that damn quilt,
I told her it was perfectly normal -
perfectly normal in the context of
our relationship,
gay to girl,
fag to hag,
demanding, hard-headed princess to
demanding, hard-headed princess.
It’s a safe bet
when you see us laughing,
we’re laughing at you or
at ourselves,
at our sexless marriage without
the option of divorce, at
the fact that come tease or tragedy
she’ll always be the woman in my life.
© Bryan Borland
POETRY READING – 3:15/JUNE 21st for LITTLE ROCK PRIDE
Tomorrow as part of Little Rock’s Pride Picnic, I’ll be taking the mic at 3:15 for a reading – which will include the debut of my new poem Miss California. The fun starts at 12:30 at Allsop Park near Cedar Hill and Cantrell. If you’re in the area, come out and enjoy some free food and good times! Everyone is welcome!
A CLOSETED GAY BOY’S INTRODUCTION TO THE VAGINA (or JESSICA)
I was
a procrastinating pussy,
loitering round that smiling mound
of flesh as long as I could,
listing reasons not to enter just as I’d
stood freshman-awkward outside of school the
first day of class.
I was
labia leery,
allowing her wrist and womanhood to
grow weary of merely masturbating me.
She wore scrupulously-selected bra and panties,
I wore off-brand emperor’s clothes of virility,
both of us naked of excuses and delays.
I owed it to her because
she listened when I suggested she should cut her hair short,
because she wore unisex fragrance,
because with my eyes shut tight her body
bled into hallway boys and Jonathan Taylor Thomas.
The same way a mother-forced child
eats his vegetables and cleans his plate,
I held my breath and paid my dues, carrying
the story of my debt and her satisfaction
like a convict proud of a jailhouse tattoo,
an indication of what I was and swore I wasn’t,
thinking I’d bought myself some time
but thinking wrong.
© Bryan Borland
I ONCE BELIEVED IN POETRY
I once believed in poetry,
made one of the faithful flock in
the church of my first apartment,
carrying yellow pads full of
scripture in first person over
the threshold like a giddy newlywed,
those inebriated verses
too sweet like wine with a teaspoon of sugar,
the day translated into iambic pentameter,
His hand/upon/my leg/would be/my muse
and feed my masterpiece, my scribbled
discipleship to Him,
His words appearing red in
the holiness of haiku, in
the stigmata of my sonnets,
from the blood that kept flowing,
from the ink that kept dripping until
the revelation of my
crucifixion, the crisis of religion
that robbed me of my God and left me
a heathen with an empty notebook,
unable/to/write a/sing/le line.
© Bryan Borland
