Monday 13 October 2014

Heart to Heart, a Plea for Common Sense


Several emails from readers worried sick about the reaction of family and friends to their coming out prompted me to write today’s poem.

If acknowledging to ourselves we are gay is traumatic experience, coming out to friends and family can prove even more so. especially if we live in a gay-unfriendly socio-cultural-religious environment. 

here we are in the 21st century and still homophobia is alive and kicking. In my experience, this is often because so many straight people have no understanding about what it means to be gay, trenagender of simply 'different'. - not least because they have neither really thought about it nor had a chance to discuss it, calmly, objectively and intelligently either at home, school or wherever. Consequently, they remain hung up on misleading, invariably offensive stereotypes that continue to attach themselves to gay and transgender men and women in the minds of the less enlightened among the heterosexual majority.

As I have said any times on my blogs, our differences do not make us different, simply human.

The problem with so-called political correctness is that too many people are afraid to say what they really think. How can we put people right unless we know what they are thinking? There is nothing worse than being tolerated. Sexuality deserves better. For a start, it deserves respect.

A heart to heart can work wonders. (Did I say it would be easy?)

HEART TO HEART, A PLEA FOR COMMON SENSE

Dear family and friends,
see how, come what may,
it really makes no difference
I’m gay

I’m the same person,
that’s sharing with you
the same heartfelt conviction
love is all

If love but conditional,
where does that leave us
as supposedly more spiritual
than beasts?

I crave love and peace,
and if you loved me once,
why should you love me less
for my sexuality?

Infant, now grown3 rev. 
no less a Child of the Earth
or free to run with nature’s own
for being gay

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004, rev. 2014


[Note: An earlier version of this poem was written in 2003 and first published in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]

Saturday 11 October 2014

What Goes Around, Comes Around


For as long as I can remember, Brighton on the East Sussex coast has always been a gay-friendly place. Many years ago, I met someone there with whom I had a brief fling that lasted all of one day. It was raining and we spent most of the time in his hotel room. It was my first experience of sleeping in a four-poster bed.

In recent years, I met up with an old friend who introduced me to someone with whom he had been at school some 50 years ago…who turned out to be the same young man (much older now, of course) I’d met that rainy day back in 1966. In those days, of course, same sex relationships were still illegal in the UK.

Incredibly, we recognized each other at once. Confiding some but not (quite) all to our mutual friend, we seized an opportunity later to take a trip down Memory Lane…in more ways than one.

True enough, it is a fact of life that, more often than not (one way or another) what goes around comes around …eventually.

This poem is a villanelle.

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND

What goes around, comes around,
no matter, gay or straight
as spring seeds to wintry ground

Let time, our mistakes, compound
(love will always see us right?)
what goes around, comes around

As dogs of war run peace to ground,
see humanity put to rout…
as spring seeds to wintry ground

In all nature, no finer, sweeter sound
than love songs killing hate
what goes around, comes around

Let martyrdom, its myths compound
where light and darkness mate
as spring seeds to wintry ground

Where sexuality dares speak its mind
(or society construct a closet)
what goes around, comes around
as spring seeds to wintry ground

[Brighton, East Sussex, March 17th 2010]

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010


Thursday 2 October 2014

Win Some, Lose Some


I suspect most if not all of us have been there, when sex is (temporarily) enough and a relationship just isn’t on the cards.

Have fun, but be careful out there…

WIN SOME, LOSE SOME 

We got raunchy in a sauna
but didn’t get very far;
others wanted in on the act
and we really weren’t up
for an orgy so we drove
into the country,
had sex among the trees,
songbirds nesting
above, indifferent and snug
as you please

Bodies kindling each other
like rolled newspapers
to a flame, plagiarizing
soap opera storylines
till dawn when we rose,
passion faded
like the moon, got real
and went home;
I didn’t ask for his number
or give mine

We both knew there wouldn’t
be a next time…

Copyright R. N. Taber 2002; 2014

[Note: An earlier version of this poem (only slightly revised here) appears in First Person Plural by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2002.]