Poetry: Timothy Ferine

Poetry:

Timothy Ferine

I

I am alone in crowds
and I'm the party responsible
for my own shame, even when I'm alone.

Especially when
I
am alone.

Letter I,
sound in pride,
bolt upright,
certain as a sun
I shine.

Infection
of inspiration
sheds light
across the insight of I.

Then imagination is with I
You remember--
I told you.

Listen I said
as I moved toward the end of my line.
Can I borrow $111.00,
I need something to stand over
as I scowl disapprovingly
because I knows
how much I don't know.

I knows nothing;
who does I think I am?
I don't know.








CONTINUUM


Sexuality stretches from point to point
with an infinity between. Degree
by degree everything sprawls out like
arms embracing possibility. We all fall

to our knees on the floor before a man
a woman or both. The only way to see
the difference is in the dark. Straights
over here. Gays in the rear. Bis everywhere:

Everything makes sense when you know
where you stand, but on the other end
of reality sits the opposite, opposing it:
Opposition is true friendship.






POSSIBILITIES

moments on the time line
where things might change,
or maybe not.

i remember when
david bowie freed me,
then high school cock enslaved me.

boys with girls
acting so happy
instantly hollowed out to me

in the glitter age
when everyone bloomed
across blurred edges

into themselves, out of convention's bondage
for a fashion-instanr--
long enough to please.

opening minds can't shut blinds.
evolution comes in bursts.
what else could kurt say:

"everyone is gay."








PLUNGER JUSTICE

I am alone in a vacuum world
where Pink Floyd, Inc. manufactures
psychedelia in the form of a decal,
a sticker you try to scrape off
from the moment you put it on, but you can't.

And the children tote guns in their backpacks,
and heroin in lunchboxes instead of sandwiches.
This is the world my generation settles for:
quality of life crimes justify the laws.
Crime is the mayor I didn't vote for.

Capital punishment assuages
the public need to do something
even though it's no deterrent and will never be.
Governors who believe in executions
should be required to kill murderers with their bare hands only.








PIERCING BLUE
    after Michael Z.

His blue eyes are warm like knives,
they slide into my soft butter center; I drool
information in all-wet words--
just to make myself matter.

I feed him acid, blow him
in the sauna: two bodies
puckering in the hot. We're
rung like towels, sweaty

essence gushes from us.
I say he is an angel, that
I can tell these things  His eyes reply:
"I know you're insane. I'm only a little boy.

You'll move in with me and give me
a reason not to die. I have spoken--I am the angel."
Then I stay six more years: we are two men
trying to pretend, until he leaves me and I make a friend.






13

I was alive with pleasure,
sucking on a Newport 100
and acting-out with straight boys:
a few times it worked, but
mostly I only lost another friend
only to recapture him in my
unceasing masturbations.

My genes destroyed my body
on the microcellular level before
I had the chance to intervene.
I have always observed life from
the outside looking into the outside,
longing. I spend my life touching
the ones who'll touch me.

What I want is always behind
a tall fence, or else it's invisible.
Half the battle is impossible:
A lock clicks as the door vanishishes.






PORNOGRAPHIC GLYPHS THAT DON'T MEAN


Johnny Rham Das Twopack Shankar keeps me from feeling.
He tells me stories and I believe him.

I'm wide open to suffering as a physical entity
which I am, which is to say:

a metasystem under a subsystem.
(You can't fit a metasystem under a subsystem--there's no room.)

There were miles of cars and I went to my guru
and he said something obscene to me:

we're not thinking about the cheap cop-out here;
we're thinking of perfection in an imperfect world.






UP AND OUT

Climbing up is the only struggle worth enduring.
Opening up is the only goal worth achieving.

At the corner of Change and E. Stasis Circle
I saw the light change but life keep going.

So what does it all mean to me now in my wheelchair?
It means I lucked out of my proud life and fell down.

And I can't always get back up but I keep trying.
You can imagine what I once was like an essay

or you can answer the question of who I am: I'm a friend,
a possible past with a different skeleton in the brain closet;

my heart's happy to be verifiably alive,
glad for the good of the sex drive, it chases me out.