bi_janus
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Posts posted by bi_janus
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I love ambiguity. This is very nice, indeed, Camy.
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In Year 69
Bi Janus“Whatever is seen by such a heart and mind is a flower, whatever is dreamed is a moon”—Bashō Matsuo
Dead wood
To burn
Or place upon a stand -
God the Problem
Bi Janus
To hell with power and hate and war. -- “Instruction to Angels,” Kenneth Patchen
Streaming earthward and to each as he deserves:
The powerful deserving power,
The strong deserving strength,
The well deserving health,
And the wealthy deserving wealth.
The powerless deserving servitude,
The weak deserving impotence,
The sick deserving blight,
And the poor deserving slight.
Were it not so,
What a problem God would be,
Strangling nature
While collecting fares.
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God the Problem
Bi Janus
To hell with power and hate and war. -- “Instruction to Angels,” Kenneth Patchen
Streaming earthward and to each as he deserves:
The powerful deserving power,
The strong deserving strength,
The well deserving health,
And the wealthy deserving wealth.
The powerless deserving servitude,
The weak deserving impotence,
The sick deserving blight,
And the poor deserving slight.
Were it not so,
What a problem God would be,
Strangling nature
While collecting fares.
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God the Problem
Bi Janus
To hell with power and hate and war. -- “Instruction to Angels,” Kenneth Patchen
Streaming earthward and to each as he deserves:
The powerful deserving power,
The strong deserving strength,
The well deserving health,
And the wealthy deserving wealth.
The powerless deserving servitude,
The weak deserving impotence,
The sick deserving blight,
And the poor deserving slight.
Were it not so,
What a problem God would be,
Strangling nature
While collecting fares.
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Wonderful evocation of the awkwardness of youth, Camy. Thanks for sharing this.
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For Valentine’s Day 2018
Caravaggio Eyes
Bi JanusIn Summer at the Borghese
I first glimpsed you
First was held by your eyes
Wanted to drink
From the hollow
Above your collar bone
Be held as you held
The overflowing basketThen in the Fall
In the hallway outside
Of Physics class
I looked again at those eyes
Wished to look away
But was held fast
Wondering at the mouth
And its plain questionFor want of an answer
A universe turned to vapor
As I look out at the river
Five decades since
I regret failing to seize
That wonderful mouthBoy with a Basket of Fruit (1593-94) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
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Many thanks for your kindnesses, both to those who read the story originally and to those reconsidering it. And, thanks to the Dude for featuring it. Elements of the story are, alas, autobiographical.
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Sixto Rodriguez in South Africa, March 1998
Bi JanusAve, South Africa, blessed among nations,
and blessed is the great mystery
such that you cannot believe
that the dead is risen and is flesh.
Ignored in the Motor City and America,
when you struggled and Afrikaans children
had no voice and no way to help,
Rodriguez gave you a voice
and a vocabulary--"establishment."
He is a carpenter to this day,
and lives in his native home.
You took a chance that annunciation
was no scam, that the voice
would become flesh,
and then the great mystery
in your presence was flesh and sound.
Up from The Sewer, bigger than the King
or the Nobel laureate.
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You’re as professional an editor as I will ever need. As far as formatting goes, Scrivener 3 has everything I need, and I can buy my own ISBN numbers. Your rates are very reasonable! Thanks for all your help over the years.
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Nicolosi*
I was in the familiar office for the last time. My father was no longer convinced that I could be cured. I had come to believe that therapy is the construction and sharing of stories, and I had realized that the good psychologist had spun my story before I had first arrived at his office. He was a Freudian, who had wasted no time—I mean in the first fifteen minutes of the first appointment—in telling me that my desire for other boys was the result of an overbearing, cloying mother and a distant, disapproving father. Once I acknowledged that story, he said, I would then stop seeking approval of other boys. I thought his whole story ludicrous from the get-go. I didn’t want their approval; I wanted other things from them. Now, two years later…
"I'm still meeting guys from the web."
"Well don't beat yourself up about it. These impulses are hard to resist; it will take time."
At least he didn’t scourge me; he always seemed so reasonable, if unchanging. "It's been two years."
"Two years with me after seventeen with your parents."
“You have your story, but here’s my story. I’m gay, and always have been. For two years the space between my reality and your story has grown wider. My mom isn’t possessive or cloying. She encourages me to try things—not the things that worry you—and to make friends. My whole life I’ve gone on sleep-overs, vacations with friends, and school club meetings. She has a normal parental interest in my life, but isn’t trying to run it.
My parents are partners, and they don’t control each other. When you first started spinning your story, I began to look at pictures and videos my parents had shot. My dad holding me, teaching me to ride a bike, helping me with homework, and, when I was a baby, letting me sleep on his chest. He doesn’t approve of everything I do—thankfully, he doesn’t know everything I do—but he’s never made me feel bad about myself. That’s my story.”
“Yet, he sent you to me.”
“He found you because I was tired of being bullied in school and being different, not because he didn’t like me. You’re a Freudian, right, and Catholic?”
“I guess you could say that, but I’ve come a long way beyond Freud. And yes, I’m a faithful Catholic. Are you happier now? Are you still upset about being different?”
“At first, I came to you because I was worried, but after a short while I was more curious about your story than anything else. I’ve been taking science classes. I’ve learned that in science, you don’t start with a story; you start with an honest question. You have only your story, and now I have an honest question. If being gay makes me ill, how come my grades are good, I love my brothers and sisters, I have few but good friends who are okay with me, and I see a future for me just as I am? I’m horny and like getting off with other boys and just talking to them, too. For now, I find many of them on the net, but that won’t always be the way it is. I’m off to college next year—lots of in-person guys of my persuasion.”
“You’ll never be happy.”
“I’m taking the another step toward happiness—not coming to you any more. Your story has exhausted itself.”
*Google Joseph Nicolosi. He died this year.
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You may remember George Carlin's riff on the FCC's banned words list for television. Looks as though our current administration has created its list for the nation's public health agency. See the article below:
After all, if you can't trust science on climate change, why trust them about medicine--I note that "faith-healing" is not a banned term.
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My country now seems a sea of grievance, in which disagreement is always personal affront, so (blame it on Pedro, who called to me)...
Christmas Wish for the Donald
God--any variation or none--
rest ye merry readers every one
who strain to divine in glory
just the right story
for all who have suffered this year
to provide a full measure of cheer
without giving offense,
or at least with no malice prepense.
For every contoversy is personal,
astounding this bisexual
though at least no Moore
in the senate my death to procure.
In the line to pay for a calendar
showing me a right blasphemer,
I give the joyous greeting--
Happy Holidays at this meeting,
for you may be Parsi or Baha'i
or a flavor of not-ist, as I,
whose holy days I do not begudge
though the Donald has judged
that MAGA means Merry Christmas,
the mark of the true and a litmus.
I abjure no one's myth or story--
beatitudes seem salvatory--
but as life closes I wish
the Donald and his kith less pettish.
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If sex reveals something important about characters, other than that they can have sex, sex takes its place with other forms of human expression.
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Saw-rite, James,
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Paul Simon bows deeply to you: one of the great tunes of a summer break during High School in '65.
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Some of us have come a long way, others not so much.
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Mike will post a short piece of mine on Saturday next (4/29). The story details how a three-year-old in foster care comes to live with two gay men with the help of John Ruskin and Dr. Seuss. The three-year-old is one of the main characters in my Goldendale series; this, then, is something of a prequel.
Thanks to Mike for all his dedication and patience and to my editor.
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Jonathan Demme, who gave us Philadelphia, has died. We owe him gratitude for this film.
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John (1983)
Bi JanusIn the night perhaps,
Your parents and the priest
Huddled about your crib
And plunging their hands
Into your lovely chest
Girded your heart
With a circle of thorns.So that when you took
The road to Emmaus
You reviled yourself
Met on the path.On that road I knew
Your heart beneath thorns
And when we loved
The moments of joy lived
Until every joy was pricked
By those thorns
I could never unwind.At the last
You in the chair
Your search for love ending
I held your wasted hand
And when you asked
If Jesus of the Sacred Heart
Wreathed in thorns loved you
I lied and whispered
To the last sense to leave
A lie—Yes. -
And by a lot of American kids.
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A collection of short stories and one poem about various djinni, creatures created by Allah from fire, as man was created from clay. The stories are about the relations of these two orders of creation and include several gay characters of both orders. Edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, scifi/fantasy at its best, many by middle eastern authors, but also with stories by Claire North and Neil Gaiman.
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For want of a comma, a dairy might pay 10 million dollars.
Scan to donate
Turing & Burroughs by Rudy Rucker
in Review Row - Books In Print
Posted
What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos?
My son recommended this book, originally published in 2012.