Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Your Place or Mine...?


As regular readers worldwide will know, I’ve been living with prostate cancer for 5+ years now and am doing OK. Hormone therapy continues to keep my PSA low and the cancer at bay. However, I will be 70 this year and time is not on my side.

One of these days (hopefully not for a good while yet) the Grim Reaper will pay a visit, and my blogs will eventually disappear from the Internet.  Now, the blogs are the only record of my revised poems as well as many others that have not been published and are not included in my collections. I am considering publishing them as e-books to Kindle Direct Publishing. If any blog readers think they might be interested in buying (inexpensive) e-editions, please let me know as the degree of response will determine whether or not I proceed. I would have to open a separate bank account and if the chances of at least breaking even financially are not looking too good, there is no point.

In the past, I have self-published my poetry because no publishers were interested in my gay-interest material which I have always insisted on including. [Why should p[poetry on a gay theme be seen as something quite separate from poetry on any other major theme?) Yes, I have about broken even but, no, I will not be publishing any more print editions.

Should I feel sufficiently encouraged to go ahead, I may well try and publish the serialized novels on my fiction blog to KDP as well. [Incidentally I am still working on Mamelon 2.]:


I don’t allow comments on the blogs because too many people flood blogs with irrelevant, even silly comments, but if you would like to express support, please email me:


A reader recently emailed me in Russian and the translation button would not work. Can he or she please try again as I will always read and respond to emails.

Meanwhile…

For the unattached, cruising bars can be fun, and it can also be the kind of devastating if not drunken experience likely to send a person’s self-esteem into free fall.

The trick is to never stop believing in happy endings whatever happens...or doesn’t happen, as the case may well be.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE…?

I was in awe of his beauty,
sure he’d want  nothing to do with me
so tried my luck elsewhere

Stood beside him at the bar,
bought him a beer, but he turned his back
(someone else’s luck)

A tipsy queen chatted me up,
followed my line of vision, raised eyebrows
shooting me down

In vain, I tried to block us out
of mind and spirit, self-denial no match
for a body in flames

Couldn’t keep away from him;
white singlet, shorts, a body to die for,
but always busy flirting

No one else firing my fantasies
or even a make-do ‘bird in the hand’ in sight,
just slaves to stereotype

Walked home that lonely night,
too preoccupied with wishful thinking to hear
footsteps catching up with me

Same hair, eyes, lips, body to die for,
but an altogether different, almost shy persona
quietly, earnestly, asking me…

‘Your place or mine…?’

Copyright R. N. Taber 2013



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