An Unromantic Poem

They say a poem’s sure to scale the wall

To women’s fortressed hearts and hidden lust.

They say that chicks love sonnets most of all.

Romantic rhymed’ speaking is a must.

Most girls have never bothered reading stuff

That looks like lectures from an English class.

Those that do like sex talk coarse and rough.

But geeky poems never got me ass.

I’ve written piles of sappy emo prose

I don’t get laid. I don’t get diddly squat.

No odes to flaxen hair or fragrant rose

Have ever got me boobs to kiss or twat.

So screw those dick weeds speaking on the fly

These sonnets suck.  It’s all a fucking lie.   

Vogon Poetry

The following is my first attempt at Vogon poetry:

A Vogon Sonnet

Thy gangledworts be ever on my hronds

And splingle forth in splooshing gartred  thorls.

They ooze in squacking whindling nether ponds

That proot in misty morning flacting whorls.

How fragrant are thy trondly drondlebees.

How sweet thy marstled under froaging bracks.

Do furtled qualmlies sneep thy dangled speez?

And squirting cromblies crosh in all thy cracks?

The ancient drackleglopleflibbers stare

At flassing goles that treek when ere you pass.

And crechle when thy flassing anus bares

thy flurbed’ clouds of hidden ploothed’ gas.

I’ll one day hear thy flatumenic tones

And rist thy sphlinctered nipply trunts…see if I don’t. 

(N.B. Vogon sonnets "mostly" follow Shakespearean style.  They are iambic pentameter with an ABAB CDCD EFEF rhyme pattern.  The final couplet deviates from standard form in that apparently ALL Vogon poems end with the phrase "see if I don't.")

Mother's Day

My antipathy towards men has been especially acute today.  Even I have been troubled by the things I’ve been saying today about all the unfortunate victims of testosterone poisoning .  But I realized I was channeling my mother.

My mother was very attractive and incredibly intelligent.  She was also very troubled.  She was a paranoid schizophrenic and was committed twice for it.  Yet the courts decided that it was a good idea to let her raise my sister and me alone.   It was at times like being raised by Caligula.  But there were some advantages to it.  Being raised in two different realities (Mom's and everyone else's) you become an expert on passing between worlds.  You have to in order to survive.  

My mother’s hatred of men was legendary.  My father told me once that during the short time that he and my mother were together, he felt like a stud.   She only tolerated his presence when she was fertile and as soon as she got the babies she wanted from him, he was out.   She never remarried and preferred to live in the dark the rest of her days like Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations.  Until the end of her life she blamed my father for ruining her life, even though she hadn’t had any communication with him for forty years.

She never understood my being trans and insisted that I was gay.  In her defense, she was always very supportive of her gay son and even tried to set me up with male nurses from the hospital.   “Mom,” I would say, “why are you doing this?  I’m not gay. I’m a transsexual.”

“Sweetie,”  (she always called me “Sweetie”,) “how could you possibly be a transsexual and not be gay?”

“Because I’m a lesbian?” 

“Jimmy, you aren’t a lesbian.   Just because you haven’t like any of the boys I’ve picked out for you…that doesn’t mean you’re a lesbian.  It just means I haven’t found the right boy for you.”

I suppose that technically speaking I was gay.  I just wasn’t gay the way she thought I was gay.

She never attended any of my marriages and always thought I was wasn’t being true to myself (since I obviously liked guys.)   After 20 years of marriage, my mother still had not learned my wife’s name.  She was always “that girl I married.”  Even went I presented her with grandchildren, her response was, “they’re gorgeous.  But tell me, Sweetie.  Who’s the father?”   She did adore those kids, though, in her own peculiar way.

We were not close when I grew up.  Every time I tried to reach out to her, things would go well for a time.  Eventually, though, she would start talking about the teams of people that followed her whenever she left her apartment or the woman that called her up every year on her birthday to say that she was going to kill her.    I tried to be patient, but I knew that eventually she would start to accuse me of conspiring with her enemies.  That’s when the arguing would start anew.

My mother died seven years ago.  My sister said that she died only when she ran out of people to torment.  She said she wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes spread out at the second hand store which was her favorite place in the world.  She didn’t want any sort of memorial and wanted her ashes distributed in secret because she wanted all traces of her existence erased from the world. 

 I didn’t cry at her very small funeral, but I would give almost anything to sit and listen to her paranoid ranting just one more time.

Remembrance of bears past - a sonnet

You shook and shared in countless open nights

with Frappuccino-scented microphone

your tales of pulled’ pork and southern lights

and hidden canyons viewed with me alone.

I loved your gently crooked cheek.

It brought more joy than words could ever make.

I loved that from the depths I heard you speak

When I from surgeon’s slumber did awake.

Was it my form that made you turn and seek

for solace in your nether’s mirrored twin?

Was love for you too low and far too weak

To counteract my body’s hidden sin?

My bear is gone and I am all alone

I slip back to the shade where I am known.

Socrates on gay rights

In Plato’s “Euthyphro,” Socrates talks to a student, the eponymous  Euthyphro,  about the nature of holiness.    Euthyphro says that holiness is whatever the gods think is good.  Socrates  counters that by arguing (by way of questions) If the gods approve of something because it is holy, then their approval cannot be what makes it holy. Alternatively, if it is holy because the gods approve of it, then we still don't know for what reason the gods approve of it.

It is possible to paraphrase this argument in the gay-rights debate.   Anti-gays are fond of saying that homosexuality is wrong because it is against God’s will.  They point to all the Bible verses that support this point.  Were Socrates to get in on this argument, he would no doubt go all Columbo on their asses and say, “Well, obviously you know more about this than I do, but there is just one little thing I don’t quite understand.  Is homosexuality wrong SIMPLY because God says that it’s wrong or is there something inherently wrong with it that caused God to say not to do it?”

“If” Socrates would continue, ”you say that it is wrong JUST because God said it’s wrong and no other reason, then you make God out to be capricious in condemning people that did nothing wrong. On the other hand, if God said it’s wrong because there is something  independently wrong with it, you need to describe what that thing is.”

When asked this question, anti-gay activists are perplexed and try to dodge the question entirely.  Using authority as a reason to be against something is a failed argument.   The anti-gay attorneys at the recent Supreme Court hearings hit this wall.  Because of the first amendment, they were precluded from using religious reasons for why DOMA and Prop 8 were constitutional, and their attempts at finding secular rationales were laughable.  The best argument they could come up with, and the focus of their case, was that only heterosexual marriages were valid because they were the only kinds of couplings that could produce children accidentally.  WTF?

I am still waiting for some Christian to answer this question for me.  Kindly send your reasoned responses as commentary to this blog entry. (note: saying "because...because....fuck you!" is NOT a reasoned response.)