The dance class was on the top floor of
the Diamond
Buddha converted warehouse
where the instructor made us crawl
on the floor in a circle, one in front of the other.
I was the oldest and slowest
to the point where everyone else was held up
until one went around me; everyone
joined in, overtaking me.
Suddenly that moment of being
the clown on stage,
just after I broke up
with Issa, after three years of living together
in a house of strangers, I burst
into a monologue of sound, spit, the odd word, I
jumped off the
stage falling over a random suitcase that was slightly under
the empty table,
crawling/squeezing
between the main doors with a green sign, EXIT, tears running
down my cheeks, making the face paint run down my
neck
onto the frilly shirt.
Lying on the street, I decided to climb up onto my feet, pushing open
the doors, stepping back inside. Everyone was staring,
the barman asked, “This or that?” pointing to the gold then the silver tequila.
The words adorning a random t-shirt from a solo audience member,
MOON ANDROGYNY,
drawn from some polytheistic text describing in intricate detail gay
sex sighting
the bottom
as the androgynous one,
but every androgynous soul I knew was a top, “no matter
their genitalia, they just love stretching me over the coffin
to fuck me. I
only attract lovers with recently deceased mothers
holding a high sense of ritual, each one peppering foundation over the
face of the corpse...” I was saying to my friend
who was distracted, trying to rip out a wasp caught in her hairsprayed mess.
I was lying on the floor exhausted out of myself, rolling
around like I was in a 1960’s rebirthing workshop screaming
out all those years when I denied or repressed or lied. “It seemed weird
no one wanted me to wear one of their mother’s dresses.”
She just giggled,
“You’re such a man sometimes, that hole in the
gut yearning
for otherness makes
you think
the female is a goddamn fantasy.”
Tom Bland’s poetry pamphlet, The Death of the Clown, is out with Bad Betty Press. His new book, Camp Fear, is coming out in 2021.
