Heart to Heart, a Plea for Common Sense

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

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.]

What Goes Around, Comes Around

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

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

Win Some, Lose Some

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

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.]

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.]