NIC BURROSE

HOMO

(for Nic A. and Sam)

Call Me A Homo

Rubber-riot-bullets from the gun barrel mouths of

Sexually-frustrated mooks and tourists

Flat-headed people who live in flat, gray worlds

Crumpled maps stained with cheap alcohol and tweak-fueled, blue-balled up anger

Towns torn by white picket faces

Even the roads a little more than crooked

Golden gates slammed shut, chained up

And air-locked by a sloppy-drunk mall-cop

Call Me Fag

Derived from the word "faggot"

Faggot, a funeral pyre

Just like the ones lit in Salem to burn witches at the stake

When oceans were overridden

By semen sailing aboard phallus-crowned ships

Streaked with sea-spray and the blood of natives.

Call me a flaming fag

The Brits eventually adapted the word "fag" to mean "cigarette"

I need to light up. Got a match?

Wrap me in rainbows and burn my pants to ash

And with it, a system that keeps us trained and leashed

Inside a gentrified, gender-fied, dying forest mainframe

Of bathroom door sign silhouettes.

Do I sound angry fire?

Should I feel sorry for you for wanting to burn me?

I could flip you the bird, call you an ignorant asshole and let you punch me in the nose

But the Emperor who Wears No Clothes knows

That black n white are not part of the rainbow spectrum.

Newborns explode into this world

Attached to umbilical cords that stretch back endlessly

Into a cancerous womb of a blood-spattered history of patriarchal brutality and stupidity

That not even the precision of brain surgeon scalpels could ever sever completely from this atrophying body

Call Me Queer

And pluck me like Lady Holiday's Strange Fruit hanging from a tree

Like Zykoln B and ovens burning pink triangles in National Socialist Germany

Like Jerry Falwell saying San Franciscans deserve to die of AIDS and burn in Hell

And the flocks upon flocks of sheep counting sheep

Praying that their folded-hoof dinner table graces and confessions

To a man who died on a cross over 2000 years ago

Will somehow absolve them of their cross-burning sins.

Sheep counting sheep asleep at the wheel

Too numb to wake from their vacuum-tube-TV-screen coprophagic orgies

Swallowing plate upon shit-plate

Of Bible-pounding Evangelical hate--whole.

Call Me A Homo

Because I'm human

I'm sorry if being human seems threatening to you

But I think you may still be a bit confused

About the words you choose to describe my friends, family, and I

When you call us gay, dykes, fags, queer

HIV-infected, diseased sons and sisters of Satan.

Believe me, we know you hate us.

You've made it more than clear that you don't believe in same-sex marriage

But don't mistake us.

Don't mistake the threads we wear

For the homoerotic skeletons unravelling in YOUR closet

Call Us Homos

And hate what you don't know

Call me homo because I am homo sapien,

A sucker for romantic semantics and stories of true love in all shapes and colors.

I'm sorry for you if you don't know what it's like to have love in your heart,

It must be a very lonely place where you are.

But know this:

Your words of hatred fuel a fire

That burn sticks n stones,

Carbonize flesh and bone into diamond powder,

And mangle language into a meaningless buzz

On the pyre of a four-letter word.

March 2010