This is a poem by Lee,

made with love.

Today’s piece is by a lifelong collaborator, Lee. I hope you like it as much as I did when they performed it for our friend Mars Ibarreche’s exhibit at the Simchowitz Gallery in Pasadena.

The Mythos of My Gender,
Deeper Insights into My Fragmented Archetypes.
A Working List

1. A beauty Queen in boxer briefs.
   She fingers through her junk drawer for costume jewelry
   sucks your hard plastic sapphire like ring pop
   She’s a Photo Booth pervert,
   closing the curtain to see who she finds.

2. He is a performance artist, and for his next piece he will devote his body to be
   cut like a behemoth Roman statue.
   He tears his muscles, and revels in how his body regenerates
   He lifts weights, until he is a bicep swirling hypnotist

   He eats six meals a day, and counts macros
   He sits in an ice bath until his abs are a cement cylinder. This is it.
   For his final show, he will throw himself down a stair master
   and as the conveyor belt pulls him to the top he’ll scream I’M SO JACKED I’M SO PUMPED and begin again.

   In his artist statement he will write,
   “Transformation is predicated upon injury.”

3. The art critic.
   Who sleeps too much, and is never hungry. Except, for the refreshments at gallery receptions.

4. All the women in her family wine their hips the same way but only she listens to 80’s synth
   Her voice is low like the light from an antique lampshade
   Ambience for White boys to chew her up and spit her out
   like obsessing when her grandmother cracks sunflower shells
   she craves to be their oral fixation

5. 2005 Matthew McConaughey introducing the Daytona NASCAR race.
   a perfect gentleman, a rugged cowboy

6. You couldn’t land on Jupiter, but rather descend inside of it.
   Fall deeper and deeper
   into its depths
   until you were crushed
   by the gaseous planet

7. “I’m an emotional person so I read theory day in and day out.”
   [Citation by Billy Ray Belcourt]

8. Words are all I have.
   and I am crushed because they are never enough.
   But after sex, when the Me I’ve sculpted is blown to crumbs on a bedspread I tell myself
   I’m more than what little I have to offer.

Published for the first time here on From Your Lips to God’s Ears.