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Poetry: You Bring Out the Writer in Me

Poetry:
You Bring Out the Writer in Me;
Coming Out Duet For Essex Hemphill;
& Learning to be My Father's Son

By Regie Cabico

 

 
 
 
 
 
Coming Out Duet
For Essex Hemphill

Hi Mom how you doing? I'm fine
I feel like shit

I've moved to Brooklyn. The rent is cheaper
My boyfriend lives there

It's pretty safe, there are cops everywhere …
Body parts found in the trash compactor

I don't trash your letters I read your letters
I hate your letters I rank them in importance with my student loans and Publisher's Sweepstakes

Including the Bible quotes. Yes, mom I go to church I haven't been to confession in 10 years.

Who's who? Tom my roommate from NYU?
I had an M. Butterfly crush on him
I no longer see him

He's great! Maria? We broke up.
Maria's a fag hag a Barney's shopping fruit fly

I'm sure there'll be other women for me
I'm a man in love with a man

I've actually started to write poetry
I'm a pansy poet

No it doesn't all rhyme
Don't show her the poems

These are my poems. A lot of these poems are very …

gay homosexual airbrushed dicks Walt Whitman gender bending Key West sunset
orgasm stall sex ejaculatory lick my boots butch boy

Vivid very vivid utre friend of Dorothy - Richard Gere gerbil anal intercoursing Truman Capote out of the closeted contemporary

Contemporary

Tell her. Give her the gospel truth.

Okay mom we have to talk when I was young I went through dad's porno mags buried under your wedding dress
I will never forget Suzanne Sommer's breasts

When I was an altar boy I stole all the bread wafers I gave Holy Communion to my sisters

I took your copy of The Joy of Sex
Semen stains on the carpet

Don't mention the semen … I mean SEE mom

Quit your goddamn singing
I am a man in love with a man
I am a gay man & I live with a man
I've always been in love with men

Brian Bradley from drama club I wanted to take him to the prom.
Ever since you gave me my first Disney record player

As soon as my poetry came out, I came out
It's one thing to be straight acting
but when I'm writing I can't lie

I write because I loathed the conformity
of Catholic military school

Years cruising the streets in search of men
With long coats,

Stuck between my teeth
hats, hiding from guys like me

Like a cross, a Gethsemane I could not change

The only personal contact
was a trail of cigarette smoke

I swooned on cigarette smoke

You feel you lost your son in an asylum of skyscrapers
I know how scared you are of this world

Please don't feel that you failed a maternity test

But I don't want to have to come home
like I am the sick nephew

Prodigal son in designer clothes
Keep him away from the babies
Especially the boys he'll contaminate them like sour milk

Don't blame genetics, dad, God

My life has borne a poetry no woman could provide

My poetry is a sacrament no church would have granted

If you listen to my words

You will never notice the absence of bridesmaids
Being serenaded by chords of rice
or miss the sound of baby footsteps

If you listen to my words fall
without the sound of stars
like grace of your denial

Don't ever think that I am not your son
or that I honor you any less

Here are my poems. Love them. 
You Bring Out the Writer in Me

Your breasts are couplets
Your body is a sonnet
Your thoughts share my soliloquy
Your kiss is imagery
Your eyes are iambic
Your tongue is trochaic
Your touch is stream of consciousness
Your complexity is Eliot
Your neck is Steinbeck
Your stubble is cacophony
Your presence is from fantasy
Your brilliance is Ashbery
Your ass is assonance
Your penis is epic
Your torso is tanka
Your rambling is a renga
Your fucking is foreshadowing
Your sighs are the climax
Your orgasms are onomatopoeia
onomatopoeia
onomatopoeia
Your clinging is Sexton
Your ejaculation is sprung rhythm
Your testicles are testaments
Your backbones are stanzas
Your viewpoints are omnipotent
I see you in epilogue
going
going
gone

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regie Cabico is a comedian, queer poet and teacher who performed for two seasons on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam."

The winner of a Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam, he has received multiple top prizes in national poetry slams with his work appearing in over 30 anthologies.

He is considered one of the top up-and-coming Asian-American stand-up comics and FootNotes is proud to reproduce his work for our readers.

All poetry appears due to the consent of the author and can be found in his 2009 publication, "A Capitalist Meltdown of the Global Kind."


For booking info, comments or to copy or reprint, go to Missbamboo@aol.com

 

 
Learning to be My Father's Son

you were a carabao lifting rice sacks under the Pangasinan sun
a handsome sailor on his way to Greece instead found a Filipino nurse
who hummed Elvis tunes she thought America would be a Technicolor beach
but arrived during the coldest Baltimore winter surprised by foods like pizza

you bought a house with a fireplace it was romantic mom said while mom
worked late shifts taking care of crack babies in south east DC you watched
basketball the bounce of your belt breaking me when I was three
for twisting the controls of the portable tv called me destroyer

you fed me the finest adobo, stews of blood garlic, chili peppers
when driving me to piano lessons you said you could never eat a piano
you could turn so red & jelly you convinced all the neighbors that you
should play Santa Claus when you were really hiding a temper that fists

thru doors the house you bought is boarded up with too many holes
to be sold your belongings strung outside a yard sale for the damned
the gorgeous cherry tree you killed with insecticides gone too
did you even know what you were doing pisces man lover of seas

whose hot spit I felt on my cheek the way my head spilt bloody
beaten by the boy across the street you lifted me by the neck
told me how you were slapped by Japanese bayonets don't cry
it doesn't hurt shaking me like a wet umbrella I want to know if you
ever saw me dad you hiding behind a hammock and sunglasses

saw the boy you made rub your back for a nickel I am tired of growing fat
like you know that you've become that apathetic sack of rice
buried in the fields what can I do to make it worth the miles
I want to play a sonata of love for you arpeggios of anger scaling

thirty-two years of tears for you metronome clicks for disappointment
in you my hands reach out to lift you higher than the volcanoes
Where gods gave men rice and from the altitudes of angels
I am not afraid to say I've come home

 
 
 

 

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