Nicodemus and the Metallic Mechanical Whale

There is sterility in travel.

In the life of a transient
flyers are more attentive
more available than a mother
they cling even while you pretend to slip
their salutations through the sweatiness of a smug
refusal to their hand-out
smiling aimlessly into guilt.

Xeroxed remindful-ness
nonsensical rhymes like the gossiped
3 little pigs
waiting for wings
with the at last wolf’s huff
puff
scatter
lift
fall
litter
In some states, the crack Nicodemus cooks
over an imagined 3D fire,
Peddling flyers is illegal.

A private high to renegotiate with useless ribbons
dyed in cheap concoctions
breaking the pattern of dancing alone
2 left feet in clowning lady bug red slippers.

Balancing the morning’s potential
Nicodemus takes another sip on a foamy avoid
and another automatic take leads to a non-seductive pull
pushing out a fog of little things
then freestyle walking with the others
to the metallic mechanical whale in leather
Italian shoes–a hurtful gift to walk into–
an awkward promise
too expensive for a puzzle
too complicated by childlike bawlings
too put together for an unfinished look:
should Nicodemus get a gentleman’s hair cut
some new gentleman’s clothing
maybe a recycled seran wrapped ear-piece
a hobo’s cup maybe?

Nicodemus finds a gigantic white suit to walk behind
a gorilla godzilla weaving through the crowd of modern mules
with galloping torsos
the elephants leap over the zebras
shitting on themselves
racing to the elevator
where the monkey grins
an inaugurated show of white teeth desperations
drones away
pushes the button

to the metallic mechanical whale
we go
we go
we go
they sing
hungover
asthmatic
xenophobe claustrophobics
zip locked into nooks and knots
there is no air left in the X-box
the shouldered remains are an exchange
borrowed perseverance
sweetness to lull sensibilities senseless.

Nicodemus makes perfect penmanship:
One last cry to say goodbye…
Those left behind
with bed sheet creases to line their faces
forever looking for that mirror
to say, to say
goodnight sun
say goodnight.

Descending deliberately deeper
into the belly
an impatient metallic mechanical whale
gives many times to prepare
assorted ornaments for listlessness
discarded in a jungle of little things.

Words to blacklist, like Polished
error free sentences.
Can words collect filth
can they take a bullet?
I’ll wash, then, hang them out
on my bambooed words line.
I’d like to hang ORIGINAL out to dry.

Now BRILLIANT is a word
worth moving your lips to
Drunk
ard
bRIL
LI
ANCE!!

To lose all your teeth–
Just BRILLIANT!

A day can conceive a Jezebel–
BRILLIANT!

A day can turn on a not so clever Jezebel–
BRILLIANT!

To Jump like Christopher Robbin’s Tigger–
BRILLIANT!

Sing Hoorah like a Pooh Bear–
BRILLIANT!

We all fall down–
Absolutely BRILLIANT!
The metallic mechanical whale comes
just whimper like a Piglet

RED LIGHT
GREEN LIGHT

We all fall deliberately further
into the belly of the whale
it eats up time
racing through a riptide void
it comes up for air on 125th
then dives back into
BRILLIANT!

To avoid everything shameful
in a little thing as a look can reveal
while riding the metallic mechanical whale
Nicodemus discovers the wonders of anonymity.
When asked why the dark shades
Nicodemus, irritated, takes them off and renders:
There’s nothing worse than a loquacious eye
blinking when they’re unsure of what’s coming
backstabbing eyes
darting back into tortoise shells of
Of Course, Of Course!
Indeed, Indeeds!
One day
we’ll congregate in the metallic mechanical whale
wearing nothing but baby powder. And in a circle of all of us
we’ll each have turns
Saying, “TADA! Think Josephine Baker.”

Wearing necessary discoveries
Nicodemus becomes a fly
on a wall in a room
the whale’s hard plastic mirrors
gives many eyes as a fly
on a wall in a room
witnessing the fleeting speed of gossip
spying for secrets:
knickers exposed
mouths open
buggered noses
Nicodemus the ethnographic scientist:

What’s the difference between
a zombie in a zoot suit and a bullfrog
hoping, hoping, to make it to the nearest exit?

Hushed! into a little thing
fitting nicely in a palm, in a pocket
iPods, discmen, walkmen hands
bury the most imitated moment
the intoxicating high of death.

Hushed! into a little thing
Nicodemus mediates electric
staring at Billy Graham’s poster
“God. Loves. You.” Next to graffiti scribbles
“Are you a sinner? I’m afraid so!”

Magnetic in the fingers
toes
weird looking circuits
hungrily standing bold
burning on the chest.

Caught in fitful fantasy
the main event explodes
as shoulders are gone first
showing off an offering
tap
tap
tap
yes
yes
yes of the feet and head in deserted praise.

In the belly of the metallic mechanical whale
it eats up time
blue lightening
thundering through caves.
Another whale rides next to Nicodemus’s.
Looking in
seeing nothing but an overpriced pastry dish
Nicodemus diddles:

Just as neighbors ought to be
this is yours and this is mine
we’ll be pleasant in the living area
and say, “How do you do?”
We’ll each have our own cupboards
to put the complaints in.

Safe? And for who?

I was meeting my partner at this pub after work. We hadn’t been out in awhile, and the weather was perfect for sitting outside, sipping on a Stella and enjoying a good cigarette. My partner chose this pub that she’d frequented during her law school days, an Irish pub with an outside patio. I had never been to this place before.

When I arrived at the pub, I found my partner outside on the patio. And I was so excited to see her doing exactly what we’d imagined. Relieved to see her familiar face… She seemed so relaxed and carefree, that I took my time getting to the table. She wasn’t looking at a text message or talking on the phone, she was just content with being outside in the afternoon sun, smoking a Camel Light, and having her beer. We smiled at each other once she realized I was there.

The manager, an older (maybe in her fifties, maybe Irish) woman, came out to “greet” me. She immediately asked for my ID, saying to my partner, “He looks like he’s 12!” I gave a cynical grin. This isn’t the first time that someone confused my age, and confused my sex/gender. And this is not the first or the last time that I’d be ignored because of it.

I handed her my Maryland non-driver’s ID. She glanced at it and smiled toward my partner. Her back was still facing me when she asked, “He doesn’t have a driver’s license? You need a driver’s license.” My partner replied, “So what do people who don’t drive do?”

Maybe they just never go out, and if they do they go to places that no one will ask for an ID because everyone there is outlawed by their illegality of one or several combinations: too poor, too black, too immigrant, too trangendered, and/or too gay/lesbian/queer, too unexpected. All of the above with etc. at the end.

“It has to be a New York State ID,” the manager kept saying until finally I shouted,

“It’s a Maryland ID, and as far as I know Maryland is still US territory… And by the way, I’m not invisible. I’m right here.”

Having the kind of day that I had, I really didn’t have anymore in me to put up any sort of a fight. So angrily, we grabbed our bags and left with my partner saying, “I’m never setting foot in this place again. And I’ll be sure to inform my friends who come to your pub as to why.” I’m sure the manager could give a rat’s ass about this, but we needed some sort of vindication. My partner more than me.

“I’m really disturbed by all of this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to that pub. I even know the manager, we were chatting before you came. I’ve never experienced any of this sort of borderline prejudice there.”

“Well of course, you’re white babe,” I was quick to blurt out. I mean, what else could it be but race-related?

“Maybe it’s more than your blinders you feel so self assured about,” she came back. She was walking really fast like I had somehow displaced her in a margin of either/or.

I did consider what she said, and after going over the incident outside the blinders of it being just race related, I decided that it’s because of many things: race yes, but as my partner pointed out – it could be my ambiguous gender (but how ambiguous could it be when my hips and breasts are so obvious? To me, of course). It seems that these markers are overlooked when you’re taller than most women and you don’t try to pluck and cover-up your masculinity (no, I don’t feel trapped in a woman’s body, I’m trapped in this reality called the staus quo).

Your voice is a higher soprano than what your body portrays (imagine Mike Tyson speaking, but taller and better looking) – hell, if your voice doesn’t match your perceived very simple signifiers–height + jeans + t-shirt wearing=boy, boi, boy!–it can be a messed up blur of an anomaly.

But it’s not just because I’m unapologetic about being me: Caribbean, black, woman with a huge afro, apparently ambiguously gendered, with tattoos covering my fore-arms. It’s also because I’m physically there and intimately present with my white partner who passes as a straight woman (think Brooke Shields). I wonder if the fact that she can use power tools and a Phillips screw driver far better than me makes her pass any less (no, it just makes her “hotter” or going through a phase, except this phase has been going on much longer than when she chose me). For that matter, what does that make me! (expendable.)

Quite honestly, no one gives a shit about my ambiguous gender, unless of-course I was trying to use a bathroom. I wonder if we would get the same hateful stares if my partner was African American, Asian or Latina? Well… yes, and it’s all dependant on whether or not she looks as “hot” as Beyonce, Lucy Lu (oh shit there isn’t a more contemporary image of beauty for Asians… that apex hasn’t been updated) or Shakira, and whether or not I’m as easy to digest as a butch lesbian superstar like Ellen DeGeneres.

There’s nothing more unwelcoming as stares, especially when they’re emoting, saying we don’t belong. Going out has been more of an issue than my fear of crowds, unless of course it’s at a friend’s house. We’re constantly weighing the pros and cons of whether it’s worth the trouble of traveling the distance only to be gawked at, harassed, and at the end of the night feeling so defeated. We end up fighting with each other like the sex and the love is the problem.

Oh the anguish of being an interracial “queer” couple. The plight of being Loving versus Virginia then (June 12th, 1967) and now. We forget or just choose not to remember. Let’s get our encyclopedias and our law books out, just for you! So we all can remember.

Every time we go out there’s always an incident. The last time we went to a bar in the Lower East Side for a friend’s birthday party I got into a shoving match with this guy because I used the men’s bathroom. The ladies room was occupied and I needed to go. I know what you’re saying-hold it and use the ladies-well I have held it and still paid the price with a security guard pushing me up against the wall. Or the time this guy tried to kick my ass because his girlfriend was in the bathroom. Or the time at my job when this woman informed me that I was in the Wrong Place, and What Was I Doing Using The Ladies Bathroom?

I Should Know Better.

I have many incidences of being told where I’m not welcomed, whether or not it is in a place that is a space for: Black People, Women, Immigrants, Straight People, Caribbean People, or Yes, Lesbians, Gays. It just reinforces – Yes, having a space just for one group’s agenda is very important, especially when they’ve been subjugated and excluded from the rest of society. It is very significant, but people are not living/existing in a state of stasis, especially when we have so many different backgrounds that break down from the largest to the very minutia of diversity. (PUT SOMETHING HERE. Like, a symbol, an infinity sign representing ONE or we are MANY or something.)

A woman loving a woman. That might be “tolerable” depending on who’s watching and at what particular time, because we are seemingly still living in the days of tribalism. In some spaces it might be okay to love a woman and have her love you, unless she doesn’t fulfill the stereotypical beauty aesthetic of and for the mainstream.

The message I get is that Yes, I do deserve love – as long it’s not from that pool of women that straight white men are entitled to have and to hold. I see this ownership in their eyes. Yeah I get this message every time my partner and I are out holding hands.

It doesn’t matter if we’ve been introduced as a couple, they will still hit on her right in front of me. Because our relationship isn’t considered real. Even our sex isn’t real. A good friend of my partner, who is straight, told us after a few drinks, her true thoughts on this matter. That as long as there’s no dick involved then we’re not really having sex and that yes I must still be a virgin since I’ve never slept with a man. Our lives are mere fiction you see on television every Sunday night or on the silver screen.

We’ll like to say it’s because men “naturally” have more confidence than women, that they’ll still have the nerve to ask a lesbian out. Because men are built brave. And that’s the universal law of the sexes, when in fact it’s just ownership.

Is it just shock or a mixture of fear and hatred when they only address my partner when I’m the one they’re talking to? (Even “straight” women do this. “What does this mean? Am I capable of gaydom?” Maybe you are if you’re so worried or questioning).

Suddenly we’ve broken a sacred code of ethics (well yes of-course the same sex thing is blasphemous but this other shit is taking it too far).

Maybe it would be easier for everyone’s sake if I was to mask my masculinity behind a skirt and a paint brush (but then I’d just be a Drag Queen). Wouldn’t that be hot? Two really femme hot women of different ethnicities (imagine that, the odds I tell you, the odds!), kissing in public? We could audition for “Girls Gone Wild!”

Or maybe my partner should shave her head and start wearing boots and flannel. We would totally fit the script of the expected gay couple. Can’t you just imagine us on L Word or as Queer as Folk looking fabulous? Coming this far – having a script for what a gay couple should look like, I should be more than thankful, right?

My Imaginary Margin

How do you do it?

When they’re no longer there
for you create lines around
Don’t step over my imaginary margin
for them to keep as a keepsake.
But you regret the edge you drew
the last words you said
because that’s the only map
you can remember. All I have left

Nothing is what you sleep with
when there’s no comfort in a comma
lingering between articles of linear ethics:
imitates my heart beat
cacophonies made into a sentiment.
etching out a personal war, evaporating quickly into ashes

Everything available in an exclamation mark
could never relieve the never ending plummet of being too late
no relief comes calling out to Jesus
once you’ve discovered, in every single hereafter moment
your mother’s death
when you haven’t had that chance.
the comforting trust of peace
And without any truth, you still holler
in a vain attempt at charity, you instinctively cry
the first name you’re suppose to love.
when I haven’t had anything good to say
I never tied my tongue to a subtle lisp
I did more than just say, Fuck it.
Because I’ve won this way.
I’ve won wars marking the uncertain
the uncertain undercurrents
with boundaries built on air.

Indifferent verses
separated by too many dashes
the difficult full stop
making belief a handbook
a trail to finger trace
a metronome to keep a beat
a monotonous puncture in a sum
of all you’ve ever been
You the Zombie.

A Visit to Miss Blackette’s

I held out my palms for a reading.
Miss Blackette looked at them closely,
running her index finger against their lines,
she said my hands are not in love with each other.
I brought what she had asked: a strand of lover’s hair
and a wrinkled picture kept in my wallet.
Miss Blackette held up the strand of lover’s hair
and a cottonmouth hissed its fangs at me,
slithering away, fading into a dark corner.
As she held the wrinkled picture into the light,
the ascent began. From the ceiling view
I saw what I looked like outside Miss Blackette’s room,
I saw myself in a mirror peeping through
my lover’s window, floating on a whirlwind:

My eyes were burning. Beads of sweat trapped in them, lighting splitting down the middle. My hands, that are not in love with each other, climbing really high. Perspiring. They climb to the top. To the opening of my eye. There, I see them in a one-sided room with walls covered in blood. My blood.

I see him walking jagged and long. Coming. Walking jagged and long. And she…She looks taller now and leaner as she stands against the door, staring at the mirrors where my eyes have been hung. There, pupils come alive. She stares back a cross-eyed faint blue. Letting him into our room. The capsized room. Suddenly slanted. The eyes that envy in enlightenment. Clothing taking turns. Crawling urgently. Slipping off their bodies.

The smothering smell of pussy gone foul lured the crows by my side. By my side, they begin to caw. By my side, they pick at the wooden floor. Ruffling their jet black feathers. Downstairs, in Miss Blackette’s room, her mocking bird’s laughter laughs at me. Her three legged dog, staring up at my ascent, barks Jackass louder. Wagging his tail casually. By now there’s a twangy guitar as her helper, a boy with dirty clothes and a delirious smile, sings in erratic chords:

Cuddled in torment
drowning in their own will
holding in the evening’s hours
I see them lying even
see them lying naked
weeping ruin as rain.

Miss Blackette didn’t have a remedy for my hands.
She didn’t tell me to take a bush bath.
As I gave her the twenty dollars, she said earnestly:
Your left eye will eventually become green my dear,
by the ease of seeing him coming,
walking through her door.
Made green by your stutter for words.
Tightly, warmly within.
Made green my dear,
when nothing of you grows in her.
His shadow will become your stroll. You’ll see.
As you take a step, into his footprints,
his fingerprints still settled in her skin.
Your right eye will be as yellow as superstition.