"Our Gallows" and "Every Time I Say Faggot and Mean It"

Our Gallows

My lover and I meet in our respective gallows,
sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, always
hollowed out by the waters of remembrance. My lover and I share a pontoon
in our little tragedies; a certain flick of the hand. My lover
looks at me. My lover looks at me. We sit for hours like this.
I say respective to not say lonely, to not say on my end
it is a little like, in uncharted deeps, losing footing.
My lover knows not my gallows. I know not my lover’s gallows.
 
So we sit until it cristallizes: our dear mutism, good humour,
both reflected in twin dark pools. Brown eyes. Brown eyes. Our
unconscious collective ripples across the surface. Any
hands are endlessly, finally, kept to themselves, at
the utmost point of belonging. Here
all sink in their own craddle-rubble, their child-shaped alone. My gallows
swamp me. His gallows strangle me. What it does to him I can only
assume. Until kingdom come I can decipher the angles his trembling body undertakes
on the sofa, the eventual pitch of his voice, all things careful, all things slow.
 
Our gallows I call them an exercise in mirrored solitude.
In the worst that has come, and, declawed, defanged,
comes again. Defanged, de-sorrowed, it roams again our bed in
silence, and stops just short of touch.
 
This score, my love, we both keep (I would call it religiously,
safe that whose God ever ends where skin ends?) means
skin tending skin, tending tendons, and means to do it in the dark.
Our lows, after all, are two banks of one river, a geological depression
that gave ways to this bedrock. The same water has polished
both our sides. The same mineral, though we call it in different tongues
with different names.
 
When the going gets tough – too tough, I want it to carry me, this river.
 
It all makes me nauseous. Often it makes me weep. When I do,
it is always for both; his bed, my bed, the beds we lost shards of
ourself into. In our lovely little lows of silence,
we look – dark eyes – dark eyes – widened in unison,
at what has become of us. Not what we became. This passive
past flows parallel to our selves out of the gallows.
 
Here we are made. Made to see. Each witness to the other’s
presence. I am made to look at his presence here, my presence
there, and I swear on my grave this, at least, my lover of dark eyes,
I will not blink.

Every Time I Say Faggot and Mean It

I approach the slur
         as I would a dog,
I approach the dog
            as I would a stone.
I cannot be hurt
            by a dog.
 
this is not
            a dog.
                         this is alive.
this is my tongue,
           my teeth do not bite it,
           I cannot be hurt
by teeth.
 
this is my chest.
                      I put a hand on my chest,
it is gone            
                                  I put a hand on my hands
                  they are gone,
these
are my teeth,
they are gone, they are god-
given,
I cannot be hurt
            by a dog,
                                   cannot be god and
                                   twist words.
                                   I cannot be hurt
                                    by words.
 
call its name,
call its name,
call my name, I cannot
be a dog,
cannot bark, cannot speak,
cannot bark at nothing or cry wolf-
bite my tongue before it runs
bite the dog before it runs
             like the cold.
              like my hands.
          like myself but only if there is
           no dog.
 
           I back away from the sound
                                            sound of my own voice and maybe my own words.
          not out of fear, or maybe
         not this fear.
                                                                                                            maybe next week.