Immortal Beloved

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Regular readers will know that my partner and I only has a few years together before he was killed in a road accident, and that was a long time ago. I think about him every day. Yes, I am often sad because I miss him, but it is a sadness tempered with the joy of having loved him and been loved in return; it always lifts me, and rams home the message that love never dies.

I experimented with drugs in my long-ago youth until someone told me that you can never get higher than getting high on love. So who needs drugs? Oh, but that is so true. Love is the only high worth having if only because it lasts the longest, continuing to let people like me access a spiritual dimension that has nothing to do with either religion or sexuality...and why should it?

Among the many wonderful qualities of love is that it does not discriminate against anyone, whatever our race, religion, sexuality ... Oh, yes, and age too.

IMMORTAL BELOVED

My gay love gave me a yellow rose

so that I might always recall in my heart

how love, if tended, nurtured, grows,

to a flowering only wisdom can impart

My gay love gave me an apple green

so that I may always savour at every bite

that what was, is now, always has been,

Tree of Knowledge filtering Eden’s light

My gay love gave to me a gentle kiss

to which my heart responded with its all,

a thank you for a lifetime of summers

whose birdsong a metaphor for the soul

My gay lover passed away some years ago,

but love never dies, this I've come to know

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2019

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title 'The Truth About Love' in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005.]

Haunted, Wherever Love Loses Out to (so-called) Convention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Years ago, many gay men and women would get married or even enter a religious order rather than confront their sexuality head-on and learn to live with and enjoy it. For a start, for those to whom  it is an important part of mind-body-spirit, religion should be a path to fulfilment, not a means of escape. While it isn't only gay people who find themselves having to sacrifice the love of their lives to various socio-cultural-religious expectations, if not dogma, this is primarily a gay-interest blog so...

It is one of our greater modern tragedies that so many gay people worldwide are still growing up in a gay-unfriendly environment and seeking escape rather than fulfilment; it is likely to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

HAUNTED, WHEREVER LOVE LOSES OUT TO (SO-CALLED) CONVENTION

When I was a young man,

I tried out dating girls because that’s what young men

are expected to do

I couldn’t understand

why I felt so attracted to another man as I’d been told

it was a sin

I tried to stop these feelings

overwhelming me, but couldn’t get you out of my mind

no matter how I tried

You haunted me

day and night, couldn’t concentrate for long on anything

but you

I so needed to know

more about your body, mind, and spirit than making love

in wet dreams

I’d hold you close,

kiss your smiling mouth, entwine with your naked body,

let it into mine

I can but remember

that starry night we had when you said you loved me too,

but being gay was not for you

At your wedding

the radiance of your smile spread like summer, won over

everyone but me

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010

Where the Road is Bare, Plant Trees

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Many years ago, I had a Russian boyfriend. (I would love to visit Russia. Yes, in spite of President Putin’s anti-gay stance. One day, maybe…) His name was Anatoly and he was studying here. He answered to Nat although I’m not sure even he knew how this had come about. He was not only a genuinely nice guy but also good looking and a brilliant cook. In short, he was every gay man’s dream of a partner and way out of my league, or so I thought. Yet, somehow Nat and I became more than friends during his stay here.

Nat is the only boyfriend I’ve ever had who loved poetry. (Yes, even mine.) I missed him a lot when he returned to Russia and hoped we would stay in touch, but Fate had other plans for us. About three years later, I received a brief note that has been forwarded from several different addresses to say he was getting married to ‘a girl called Anna.’ It was just as well he hadn’t put an address or I would probably have caught the next plane to Moscow.

While my poetry is a diary of sorts. no one but me will ever know which poems are based on my own life or on observations of other people’s lives or just wishful thinking on all our parts. It is not surprising then that, as I browse my poems, faces, places and circumstances spring to mind that may be directly related to the poem or simply passing at a tangent to it. So now I find myself thinking about Nat and wondering what happened to him, hoping he is happy, but concerned that a hot-blooded young gay man should have chosen to marry. Has Anna made him happy? Do they have children? I will probably never know.

None of us are perfect nor do we live perfect lives. Yet, it is in those very imperfections that the roller coaster ups and downs of everyday existence lie. Whether or not we are feeling quite up to the ride is another matter…

As I grow old(er) I find myself looking back on the past and regretting much of it for one reason or another.  After all, where has my life brought me but to this growing old alone…and me with such a capacity for love?

Oh, but a pointless exercise, this negative stuff, I agree. Better by far to engage in some positive thinking, be glad for the parts regret cannot reach and try to be that person regret could never touch. Easier said than done, but methinks well worth the effort or old age is likely to be even less of a picnic than old bones would have it…

WHERE THE ROAD IS BARE, PLANT TREES 

Smoky haze on a lonely road,

rogue leaves falling one by one

like faces in a Hall of Mirrors

reflecting such multiple fractures

of times past, hints of joy

and laughter mangled by tears,

as those I have loved and lost

gazing anxiously through my fears;

a merciless naming of parts

(success, achievement…) heads

turned by the darker side

of fulfillment, tiny flames licking

at what we care to call 'soul’

Smouldering seasons lost

to wisps of smoke, scalding caresses,

half-truths let drift with a smile;

familiar faces rallying at such times 

of need as this, reassurances

once betrayed and tossed aside,

now returning to haunt

the self-centred manipulations

and errors of judgement

that brought us here, fuelling a pyre

of purpose-built paranoia;

time to put life’s illusions to rout

and its angrier fires out

Look, and find a hunchback called Pain

planting trees on New Memory Lane

Copyright R. N. Taber 1999; 2014

[Note: An earlier version of this poem first appeared in the anthology Duende, Poetry Today [Forward Press] 1999 and subsequently in Love and Human Remains, Assembly Books, 2001.] 

Come Light of Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

For gay people around the world, from all walks of life, living in a gay-unfriendly environment, being openly gay can be hard, sometimes impossible (punishable by death in some countries!) In the end, though, love and a sense of personal identity - whatever its nature - will find a way; never easy, but worth every heartbeat.

COME LIGHT OF DAY

Come light of day
to midnight’s soul,
a love true and gay

Dark swept away,
hearts made whole,
come light of day

Open hearts, pray
let joyful bells toll
a love true and gay

Cold feet of clay,
hear a wake-up call
come light of day

Breaking away...
No backs to the wall,
a love true and gay

Let the world say
whatever it will...
Come light of day,
a love true and gay

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2017

[Note: An earlier version of this poem first appeared under the title 'Coming Together' in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005.]

Ebb Tide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Love is often a win some, lose some affair, and I suspect most if not all of us have found ourselves brooding over the latter at some time or another.

The trick is not to brood for too long, and be sure to go with the tide when it turns as invariably, in time, it will…

EBB TIDE 

Black waves

sucking the feet, tugging the soul;

distant lights pricking

the flesh, like pins in this doll man

of yours

Ours once,

moon and stars, a night like this!

Sea breeze, salty

and sensual like a first kiss before

passion takes over

We surfed

the clouds, played in moon craters

like children knowing

that soon, too soon, Someone

would call us home

Black waves

sucking the feet, tugging the soul;

same sea breeze, its promises

stripping us bare, a lifetime to share

gone, gone, gone

You, in another man's heaven;

me, on the mud banks of Eden

Copyright R. N. Taber 2000; 2014

[Note: This poem has been revised (2014) from an earlier version first published in an anthology, The Shadows of Life, Poetry Today (Forward Press) 2000 and subsequently in 1st eds. of Love and Human Remains by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2001.]

A Beautiful Thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

My poem takes its title from a delightful gay movie of the same name. It is one of relatively few mainstream movies (available on DVD) that I have seen whose story line turns on the developing relationship between two schoolboys. [Do so many parents and teachers really think gay men and women emerge into adulthood out of thin air?]

Now, parents sometimes get in touch to ask what they should so about a gay son or daughter. Do? What else, but continue to love and support them?

Gay or straight, love is a beautiful thing; it may be for a person, a place or even an idea. Whatever, it sows seeds in mind, body and spirit that will float like seeds in the wind long after we are gone.

Anyone suggestion that love is any the less beautiful for two lovers being gay is not only a gross distortion of the facts but downright sacrilegious in so far as it undermines the spiritual quality of love as supposedly endorsed by all world religions. Gay voices, though, are as seeds in the wind sure to settle and grow even where socio-cultural-religious bigotry continues to pursue its fight to flourish...

A BEAUTIFUL THING 

Though a day be my last on the good earth

and I regret many things I have done,

I’ll bring hopes of a second chance, rebirth,

to whatever we like to call ‘Heaven’

Though a breath be my last in Nature’s arms,

the world’s judgement upon me unkind,

I will submit to her dear, evergreen charms,

trusting in Peace to be always at hand

Though an eye look its last on a bird’s wing

as it soars with grace and kisses the sky,

I’ll clasp to my heart love’s beautiful thing

that has blessed me and will not let us die

For knowing you, needing you, loving you;

seeds in the wind - gay, free and true

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2014

[Note: This poem has been slightly revised from an earlier version that appears in 1^st (print) eds. of A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005; new (revised) ed. in e-format in preparation.]

  

All or Nothing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

 “You’re a fool!’ someone told me forcefully years ago when I came out to everyone as a gay man, adding for good measure that ‘All gays are losers.’

Well, all I can say is that now I know why ‘fools rush in’ and I certainly don’t feel I’ve lost out. On the contrary, in spite of my life’s many ups and downs, I feel all the more fulfilled for being openly gay. Tragically, many gay boys and girls, men and women living in a gay-unfriendly culture and/or environment may still feel unable to do so.

If it is true that love makes fools of us all, then what better way to survive this mad, mad, mad, world of ours...? Besides, we are the sum of all our parts, and as I discovered very early in my teens, we are all or we are nothing; during subsequent years spent in a closet, I came to understand that only too well...

 ALL OR NOTHING 

Who says gay love is fool’s gold

has never mined craters of the moon

or lain with another as naked as the day

they were born

Who says gay love is fool’s gold

will never have slid helter-skelter

on the Milky Way into the loving arms

of Earth Mother

Who says gay love is fool’s gold

may well have admired a lovely rose

in its season, but what of other flowers

other seasons...?

Who says gay love is fool’s gold

will always reach for reality’s sword,

forgetting that live craters of the moon

are not of this world

Who says gay love is fool’s gold

sees history’s notes on stereotypes

as a convenient excuse for more blots

in their copybooks

Who says any love is fool’s gold

has never mined craters of the moon

or lain with another, as naked as the day

they were born

Copyright R. N. Taber 2009

Second Chances

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

There are night moves and more night moves, but there are no moves quite like lovers homing in on each other to make up following a lonely, soul-destroying separation, especially after a quarrel …

Even some gay-friendly readers have asked why I write gay love poems. There is no such thing, of course; there are only love poems. Besides, I am a gay man and the love of my life, too, was gay; tragically, for both of us, he died in a road accident many years ago.

Writing about love galvanises its flickering flame in me to flare yet again, and makes me feel good (as he always did) especially when I am feeling low. 

The poem is partly wishful thinking in so far as the love of my life and I will never be reunited other than in a posthumous consciousness, and partly in response to a reader, Rob, writing in to say he has just been reconciled with the love of his life and both are 'deliriously happy'. Congratulations, both of you, and enjoy ...

SECOND CHANCES

Fast asleep, foetal position,

I did not hear the seventh stair

that would always creak

even when sly tiptoes trying

to sneak, unheard ...

In a dream, as always, I stirred,

reaching out for you,

making believe we hadn’t parted

the way we did, lashing out

with cruel words, each wanting

to hurt the other more

(it was like committing suicide);

Now, your body pressing

against mine, this dream-self

responding, oh, so eagerly

with passion, hot lips relishing

your tongue, entering caves

of loneliness, teasing me

with the happiness I cast aside

that night we died

What’s this?  A kiss, surely

meant to restore a lifeless heart,

let the blood course anew

through a body all but ready

for a coffin, for all willpower’s

attempting to find its way

pretences at of everyday living,

taking where it can,

giving precious little in return,

unable to feel anything

for longing to taste your lips

again, again, our sexuality

awakening to the rising heat

of a true reality, nor any words

(ever) necessary

Day and night, you haunt me

taunting me with images

of your naked body, loving arms

holding me closely, tightly,

as once they had before I happened

to hear gossip among those

I took for friends, workmates too,

and openly denied you-me-us

because I was weak, needed to be

one of the lads, though it meant

we’d part, no matter mind-body-spirit

likely to be sent into free fall,

by loneliness, emptiness, despair

for its not defending and clinging on  

to all it holds dear

My eyes fly open

and you are here, no mere vision,

but a whole new love affair,

You-Me-Us, redefined, ‘live’ metaphor  

for second chances 

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2013

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears (under the title Seeing is Believing) in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005.] 

Love, Custom Made

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

As life makes us run the gamut of this world’s (and our) various shortcomings, don’t all its lovers - gay and straight alike - dare to dream of being able to say, ‘We did it out way…’?

Gay or straight, male or female, where love is concerned it...for real, pretend or make-believe... it is -as it has always been, and always will be - a (private) matter of each to his or her own.  As for those who so love to gossip and/or criticise...they need to mind their own damn business and look to what's is so unfulfilling about their own lives that needs must they get their kicks out of being bitchy abut someone else's.

LOVE, CUSTOM MADE 

We dream of being together,

looking after each other,

seizing each day,

and it really doesn’t matter

we’re gay

We dream of living together,

looking after each other,

leading the way

for those to whom it matters

they’re gay

We dream of staying together,

looking after each other,

come what may

and it really doesn’t matter

what folks say

Dreams that bring us together,

looking after each other,

realised every day,

custom made for all lovers,

straight or gay

Copyright R. N. Taber 2012; 2014

[Note: This poem  appears in 1st eds. of Tracking the Torchbearer by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books. 2012 under the title 'Custom Made'; new (revised) ed. in e-format in preparation.]]

Willing Captive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Of all the accusations levelled at gay people, the idea that we are ‘unnatural’ is perhaps the most hurtful. Certainly, it is the most ignorant. As I have said many times, sexuality has to be in the genes or how come there are so many gay people from all socio-cultural-religious backgrounds across the word.  Many gay man and women grow up in a very gay-unfriendly environment yet still find themselves attracted to the same sex.

Never let anyone get away with suggesting we are unnatural, my friends. What is unnatural is betraying the most fundamental of humanitarian principles by inflicting hurt on those who mean no harm. Yes, I know politicians do it all the time, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow their example. The old rhyme isn’t true that says, ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.’ Names can and do hurt, terribly.

Those who call us names because they are too ignorant and/or lazy to look beyond the stereotype and see the person are beneath contempt.

This poem is a villanelle, and was originally requested by ‘Charlotte’ for her nephew Guy who is too scared to tell his devoutly religious parents that he is gay.

Good luck to Guy. But we should all remember that parents may well need time to get used to the idea. It may well be as hard for them to accept that we are gay as it can be for us to ask it of them. Sadly, it is sometimes the case when people are asked to go against what they have been taught to believe.

But gut instincts are strong, and love is the strongest of them all. Love, especially parental love, does not cave in easily, even to devout socio-cultural-religious bigotry.

WILLING CAPTIVE

Living in nature’s skin,
exploring sexuality;
willing captive within

Trying, anxiously, within,
for a new reality;
living in nature’s skin

Seeking inspiration,
a kinder morality;
willing captive within

Surpassing expectation,
risen to ecstasy;
living in nature’s skin

A sense of valediction
on our mortality;
willing captive within

A lasting benediction
on love’s complicity;
living in nature’s skin,
willing captive within

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2014

[Note: This poem has been slightly revised from an earlier version that appears under the title ‘The Captive Heart’) in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time (by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007.]