http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
This is not a new post but one I deleted from my general blog after receiving several troll-type emails. I usually ignore these, but friends advised me to post it on my gay-interest blog instead while continuing to link to it from to it from my Google + site as previously. Then I though, why should I? So I have re-posted it on my general blog. At the same time, friends are probably right in suggesting it will be of more interest to gay readers...
Now, we talk about 'blind' instinct, but there is a native instinct that know us better than we know ourselves, and it is anything but blind; it has a clearer sense of what to do in situations where any brooding, thinking self hasn't a clue.
In February 1969, I sailed for Australia (as a would-be migrant) on the SS Southern Cross from Liverpool. While it was a huge mistake in many ways, it was also one of my better decisions.
In short, I was running away from the UK - and a family that had no idea of how much of a psychological mess I was in or of share their of blame for it - rather than going to Australia.
Gay relationships ‘between consenting adults’ had been decriminalised in 1967 but it would be many years before society as a whole began to accept us, if grudgingly. I had left school five years earlier but saw myself as having no career prospects and was still a long way from becoming truly reconciled with my sexual identity. Apart from a growing sense of isolation, I felt hurt and angry. Significant though sexual identity may be, it is but a part of a greater whole. (Why should the greater part of me be made to feel it needs to apologise for what, after all, is no one else's damn business?)
While I will always have a great affection for Australia and the people I met there, I arrived with neither enough money nor qualifications to fulfill my dream, even in the longer term. During the six-weeks crossing, however, I’d had plenty of time to think and reflect on my motives. I found myself homing in on home truths that appalled me. Was I really such a coward?
So, yes, on the face of it, Australia was a disaster but I returned to the UK not (quite) with tail between legs but as different person, more self-confident than I had ever felt before and determined to shape my life in a positive way. In spite of a severe nervous breakdown in my 30’s, I like to think that, in general, I have succeeded. (I have battled with depression all my life but any gay angst has only ever been part of the emotional equation albeit a vital one.)
It is up to all of us - gay or straight - to make the best of things, not the worst, and be positive about ourselves, each other and life in general even when the immediate future may be looking on the bleak side. That’s when the human condition comes into its own, now a pussycat, now a roaring lion. Mind you, everyone has lapses of self-confidence in self and in humanity from time to time, including me.
If the journey to Australia nearly 50 years ago was a nightmare, my stay there was an epiphany. My return to the UK marked the kind of new beginning the poet in me had been yearning for without any real sense of either the what or the how, only the why. Moreover, I no longer felt that gay-interest poetry is something for which I should feel any need to apologise; a poem is a poem is a poem just as a person is a person is a person ... regardless of gender and sexuality.
Yes, it was a long way to go to find myself, true, but well worth it ...
SEXUALITY, ALL CAGED UP AND DEMANDING O-U-T
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left wondering
why it should attack now,
this animal lust
for freedom, open spaces
far, far, away from city faces
and grubby streets
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left wondering why
it should strike now,
this hunger for adventure,
need to prove something
although what or to whom
remains to be seen
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left feeling excited
if scared of a caving in
rather than a pressing ahead
with some heady fiction
well aware its return thread
so easily broken
Looking to play the hero
or merely wishing
to please myself for once
instead of always
putting head before heart,
doing the ‘right thing’
but right for whom after
all's said and done?
Rage, burning, a life-long
learning in flames;
passion, a feisty yearning
to escape this caged-up
non-life, a Here-and-Now
parody of a lion’s den
where the mouth gone dry,
sweat soaking the brow
Who is it, this other 'Me'
writing up emotions
half killing me to admit
in these early hours
where conscience seeks
respite in its humanity
as if its poetry were indeed
a match for its sword?
Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2017
[Note: The last stanza has since been added to the original version of this poem that first appeared under the title, ‘A Poet’s Diary’ in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber Assembly Books, 2004; revised ed. in e-format in preparation.]
This is not a new post but one I deleted from my general blog after receiving several troll-type emails. I usually ignore these, but friends advised me to post it on my gay-interest blog instead while continuing to link to it from to it from my Google + site as previously. Then I though, why should I? So I have re-posted it on my general blog. At the same time, friends are probably right in suggesting it will be of more interest to gay readers...
Now, we talk about 'blind' instinct, but there is a native instinct that know us better than we know ourselves, and it is anything but blind; it has a clearer sense of what to do in situations where any brooding, thinking self hasn't a clue.
In February 1969, I sailed for Australia (as a would-be migrant) on the SS Southern Cross from Liverpool. While it was a huge mistake in many ways, it was also one of my better decisions.
In short, I was running away from the UK - and a family that had no idea of how much of a psychological mess I was in or of share their of blame for it - rather than going to Australia.
Gay relationships ‘between consenting adults’ had been decriminalised in 1967 but it would be many years before society as a whole began to accept us, if grudgingly. I had left school five years earlier but saw myself as having no career prospects and was still a long way from becoming truly reconciled with my sexual identity. Apart from a growing sense of isolation, I felt hurt and angry. Significant though sexual identity may be, it is but a part of a greater whole. (Why should the greater part of me be made to feel it needs to apologise for what, after all, is no one else's damn business?)
While I will always have a great affection for Australia and the people I met there, I arrived with neither enough money nor qualifications to fulfill my dream, even in the longer term. During the six-weeks crossing, however, I’d had plenty of time to think and reflect on my motives. I found myself homing in on home truths that appalled me. Was I really such a coward?
So, yes, on the face of it, Australia was a disaster but I returned to the UK not (quite) with tail between legs but as different person, more self-confident than I had ever felt before and determined to shape my life in a positive way. In spite of a severe nervous breakdown in my 30’s, I like to think that, in general, I have succeeded. (I have battled with depression all my life but any gay angst has only ever been part of the emotional equation albeit a vital one.)
It is up to all of us - gay or straight - to make the best of things, not the worst, and be positive about ourselves, each other and life in general even when the immediate future may be looking on the bleak side. That’s when the human condition comes into its own, now a pussycat, now a roaring lion. Mind you, everyone has lapses of self-confidence in self and in humanity from time to time, including me.
If the journey to Australia nearly 50 years ago was a nightmare, my stay there was an epiphany. My return to the UK marked the kind of new beginning the poet in me had been yearning for without any real sense of either the what or the how, only the why. Moreover, I no longer felt that gay-interest poetry is something for which I should feel any need to apologise; a poem is a poem is a poem just as a person is a person is a person ... regardless of gender and sexuality.
Yes, it was a long way to go to find myself, true, but well worth it ...
SEXUALITY, ALL CAGED UP AND DEMANDING O-U-T
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left wondering
why it should attack now,
this animal lust
for freedom, open spaces
far, far, away from city faces
and grubby streets
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left wondering why
it should strike now,
this hunger for adventure,
need to prove something
although what or to whom
remains to be seen
Mouth gone dry, sweat
soaking the brow;
I am left feeling excited
if scared of a caving in
rather than a pressing ahead
with some heady fiction
well aware its return thread
so easily broken
Looking to play the hero
or merely wishing
to please myself for once
instead of always
putting head before heart,
doing the ‘right thing’
but right for whom after
all's said and done?
Rage, burning, a life-long
learning in flames;
passion, a feisty yearning
to escape this caged-up
non-life, a Here-and-Now
parody of a lion’s den
where the mouth gone dry,
sweat soaking the brow
Who is it, this other 'Me'
writing up emotions
half killing me to admit
in these early hours
where conscience seeks
respite in its humanity
as if its poetry were indeed
a match for its sword?
Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2017
[Note: The last stanza has since been added to the original version of this poem that first appeared under the title, ‘A Poet’s Diary’ in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber Assembly Books, 2004; revised ed. in e-format in preparation.]
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