 Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming out again. It is such a pleasure to see this space so packed, as always, and a real privilege to welcome Kate Gabriel to Lunch Poms. My name's Noah Warren. I'm the coordinator. Before we start, I'd like to extend our thanks to the people that make this possible, namely the library. Thank you, Amber, the Dean's Office and the English Department. We're hoping to see our bookseller from Pegasus, so there might be a moderate flurry at some point during the reading, but hopefully it won't be too disruptive. Before we begin, please remember to silence your phones and without further ado, here's our director, Professor Jeffrey G. O'Brien. Thank you, Noah, and thank you all for being here during tumultuous times, as they always are. Oh, look, all the poems are up here. I'm getting a preview. OK, I'm really thrilled to have Kate Gabriel here, poet, classist, activist, many other things. 109 years ago, long before Gabriel was born, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons was published, full of refusals of normative syntax and offering instead relentless sonics and punning among them a predilection for the comparative adjectival suffix, er, or er, which happens so frequently in that text that it becomes impossible not to hear her in it, among other things. Tender Buttons is at once a command to perform gender domestic labor and a joyous counter-suggestion as to how to go about seeing out lesbian desire. Kate Gabriel is a queen in Bucks County, most recent book, although we're hearing new work today, is written mostly, although not totally, in epistolary prose signed by one Turner. And in that sign-off, I hear Stein's sonic legacy, Turner, turn her, a name full of transness, both semantically and via the sonic flux that allows one to hear several meanings at once that keeps you from ever hearing only singular meaning. That book is full of trans experience and of the fullness of such experience, by which I mean that it is not only about the joys and pains of choosing one's body and gender and presentation and communities, but about all the things that intersect with that, being parsed by others, by cities, money and transit, being at risk, having to find a way or ways to live in the unforgiving spaces of culture and capital and to make intimate circuits of desire and solidarity, even with strangers sometimes, in order to make life bearable and to model something other than the prescribed and uninhabitable ways of being on offer. The poem, I Do My Best to Cheat, opens with this full commitment. The leisure you need to have sex, well, the leisure you need to write, it's leisure and everyone should have it when everybody does it won't be leisure anymore, but something else, like and also totally unlike a bed to sleep in. In that passage, sex and writing converge at the idea of free time to pursue inclination, a freedom that leisure, which rhymes with pleasure, isn't yet and would only be after a revolution so total that what it would be cannot be named from this side, but only gestured out as something else and paradoxically thought of as both a basic necessity like shelter, a bed to sleep in and quote, totally unlike that nightly space of repose that the housed have access to. This is as much a communist book as a trans book, but there's no need to think of those modifiers as separate. They're integrated in a vision of the world where to quote Adorno as one of the poems does, wrong life cannot be lived rightly, but life has to be made and has to for Gabriel, at least intermittently imply a less wrong life if not a right or one, one built by the desire for connection that the epistolary embodies. These poems are full of the names of friends and lovers at times reminding me of the queer coterie of Franco-Hara, who appears in the last poem in the book in the wicked line, even the bourgeois-Hara is not the opposite of a good time. Pause for chuckling. Gabriel's poetry, pardon the pun, is frank about sex, about suffering, about the need to connect and to resist alienating and prescriptive forces to be opposite in opposition, making life or at least letters about life, exemplary. Please join me in welcoming K. Gabriel. Thanks so much, Jeffrey. That was amazing. Thanks, Noah, for having me. Good afternoon. Hi, thank you all for coming. Fabulous, I am gonna read New York, New Work. I almost said New York, which is my geographic bias showing, forgive me. I'll try to hide it, I promise. It's 48 degrees back home right now. I'm really feeling the California. I am going to read, I'm gonna read from one poem, that is a book length poem, it's not published yet. How's the audio? People hear me okay? Amazing. And then I am going to read the entirety of another. The first poem that I am reading from is like one of my published books. It is a book length poem that is written in part out of my dream journals and the dream journals of my friends. And there's this thing that Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer say over and over again in the late 70s and early 80s before they had a catastrophic falling out. Where they talk about the fantasy to dream in unison. As if this is something that you could do with another person and they really try really hard and they don't make it happen. They were also I think translating Chaucer at the time. I really wanna see what they were working on but it's sort of buried. But so let's say that this poem is kind of written in a similar vein or with a similar desire and so it takes from dreams that I wrote down. It takes from dreams that my friends wrote down. It uses a lot of their language intentionally. So to that extent it's kind of like incorporating a sort of like collective language. And it's called Perverts. Perverts. We developed a program of eliminating other people's eyelashes. First we did it by accident as in I burned my own off while trying to sleep and then we did it for justice and then for vigilante revenge. Open the doors of perception we said approaching strangers and taking their eyelashes. It's Byron Esk. Only in the dream we said Debyeronic. Christian, my conspiratorial eyelash thief has not yet sent me his dreams. Christian, this is where your dreams will go in this canto of an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of lovers possible or actual spit subjects of the dream parliament. Who writes an epic poem in 2021? Perverts. Luckily I'll quit after some pages. I've backdated the poem to obviate my reckless poor and still unshamed decisions. Reckless, I guess the word for public health. Is that the one that? Yeah, one second, nope. There we go. Reckless, I sort through my revolutionary grammar. I do it in two big bins. One is for always repeating myself. One is for getting in trouble if I do it poorly. Then I've gone to visit my mom in the Arctic. Although it's December, there isn't any ice. She's on a boat docked in Harbor. Periodically she leads marches on the mainland, rocking the suburbanites off the balls of their feet. Neither of us is especially well-liked. I walk in the sun around stupefied, blonde mothers and children and somehow return to the water. Reckless, I guess the word for public health decisions a lover makes about his body conjunct mine according to his roommates and his tender crush. I could lidenize the shit I know. My questionable choices and getting wrought on that occasion would make the cut only because it happened indiscreetly on a half-inflated blow-up bed he shot in my mouth. Still fuck fate and villainy. I remember vividly the sore throat a doctor insisted had to be the clap and which friend was falsely informed in case of a fever that they must have been seroconverting. I forget, so we get to talking pills and diagnoses. Later, I dream of three over-sex teen vampires, real teenagers who grow and change, not just Edward Cullen teenagers. I'm one of them, a boy vampire, older brother, younger sister. Our mom who we live with on a stage exposed to the rain loves to trot us out in front of strangers as an example of truly proficient talent. It's vampire Stephen Sondheim's vampire gypsy. One of her friends says she has permission to come and film us while we wake naked from our vamping incest orgy. So I say, I'd rather be blinded than filmed. I demonstrate my preference by temporarily blinding all three of them and then restoring their eyesight. My brother who is also my lover says, quote, no, not fair, all blind you, you price your point. And then he closet our eyes and restores our sight by incanting that it's all fine now. And all that remains of the blinding is some black pus-like gore, but still I say, see, that was horrible. On December the fourth, I dream I was hospitalized at a clinic, but I break out of it. Sliding into a cold landscape in other people's yards and land. It's the Betty Ford Clinic, only it's in Vermont. I can tell because of the snow and pine needles and because everything's cut into triangles. There are deer, but they are secret. The hill I'm sliding down requires secret deer language and its owner, a friendly older white man comes home, but I don't trust him. Instead, I run and hide in a copes and write a note that later I struggle to decipher, but it has to do with the snow and sanctity of deer language, how you cannot use it to build or slide down your triangular hill in the dark. I know so little about Vermont, I can't possibly be protective of it. As if I've swapped places with Connie, who dreams of New York Yiddish kite. Setting the Bronx a cafe, a factory and lecture hall. Her acquaintance or more precisely, co-star or address C, had traveled to New York for archival research. The two walked through an unevenly gentrifying and historically immigrant neighborhood, like where Connie's grandfather moved from Poland. Stop in a cafe of Yiddish speakers, drinking hot sweet teas and clear liquors, basically paint thinner in tiny glasses. The address C of the dream tried to make contact with a labor organizer who under threat of surveillance only reluctantly allowed Connie and her gene companion access to the archives where her family history was stashed. A guarded file in the union hall, old and crowded with shelves of loose documents. In the dream, Connie could read Yiddish so she cried. The two leave the lecture hall quote, talking about like socialism or unions or something. My grandfather too briefly a socialist architect before he left apartheid South Africa, moved to Montreal and designed homes and sometimes shopping plazas. Mike dreams of a band named My Chemical Abortion. Then of posting on social media, asking crushes to reveal themselves, but only his coworkers responded at the job he's trying to quit. Then he was living in the woods. Once Mike dreamt he was walking himself on a leash. Did I get that right? Waking up, I told you that my head felt like a black velvet bag. What's in the bag you asked? Nothing I said first, then monopoly money or counterfeit money and finally crimes. Rosario once had a night terror sleeping beside her former lover now moved to Boston and gone stealth. I shouldn't laugh about it, but I do. The lover sitting astride her pelvis became Luca Brazzi from the Godfather and choked her awake. I'm no night terrorist, I'm a fake Catherine like Diane Keaton in The Godfather, a charming glamorous K married to a wayward short hot Mike. Now who's naive? He's asking in of all places, dull New Hampshire. All my outfits in part two that exquisite coat I'm wearing when Al Pacino slams the door in my face make up for the wigs they made me wear in part one where some of the Italians are actually Jews like James Kahn. I'm definitely naive. Senators kill people. So do presidents and Democrats this week more than ever. I'm an intense wave, nay Adams. I'm God and this is my husband Michael. Warren Beatty cast me in reds as I bundled the Corleone kids in the back seat and steal away from the fifties. I tease Roe for liking Jewish women. I ask her when she when is she gonna convert but she says that that would ruin the fun in being the Shiksa, which is to say in dating us. Rachel didn't care for the Godfather which she says was mostly about men and that's true. Maybe accept Talia Shire whose minor and complicated history balances loyalty to husband, father, brothers with hating Al Pacino's implacable guts. But I'm fixated on the recent history tragedy of Europeans who became white. And I don't mind the movies homosexual exchanges of death, fruit, favors and crimes. I like men and villains. I like the romance of kissing your brother on the eve of the Cuban revolution. Christian, I lied, your dreams go here. Once you dreamt that an unfamiliar coworker was giving out spray bottles of what you assumed to be weed, your chef gave you one and asked if you ever go shooting and you said yes when you play basketball. Later down a small town street chased by young boys taunting you when you tackled and you spoke with one who said his sister was Mary Shelley but she wasn't famous yet. The evidence being that her brother didn't yet know Frankenstein. You send me this dream and I nearly replied, oh, you tackled Percy? Think about it. I stopped myself but Stephen says in the Shelley's letters they call each other brother and sister. So I guess you kind of did. Quote, contemplating hell, Brecht says. My brother Shelley supposed it would mostly resemble London as Brecht thought it would be like LA where the fructifying trees die without expensive water. The brothers Brecht and Percy kiss on New Year's. They join the revelers in the former banks. They surely would. Now I'm your twin but I haven't written Frankenstein. Sunk into the mud at the Villa di Adati miscarried or done anything of note. I'm 17 or 27. I dream of wearing a harness and asking to be hooked to something. Nobody's listening. I say hooked, hooked but you don't understand. Soon after I dream I'm lying rather innocently on your lap and you're flicking hair off my face strand by brotherly strand. Bianca dreams of an alternate life but the same time in place. A drive through Lincoln. There's a king's dominion only it's near the city. She has to run up a ladder, a long ladder, protect a Russian mafia boss with a thick, beautiful body surrounded by guns and ammo. Some of it's orange. We have to protect him too, but it's easy. Next she sees a Sereno de Bergerac and a bowl of gazpacho. There's a kitchen at the theme park. She's making first soup and then a long line of vaginas. Quote, our bodies are like clay. It looks like an O'Keeffe lava lamp but thin billowing. Is she in school? The revolution gradually takes place maybe French but Bianca suspects because the gazpacho is that it's probably Spain after all. Like on January 19th, I dream of swimming in a polluted river called the Sey which isn't is not the Gowanus Canal. I wasn't was not in the mob. I definitely had a boss with fat cheeks sat in the nylon folding chair and I also dreamt about purges. I was a delegate in the National Assembly in 1789. Our meetings to place in a pool. I lined up brightly colored straws on plastic rhinoceros toys as the blatant symbol of caucus maneuvers. In the dream, I was on acid and a very strong swimmer in the bourgeois pool that covered many rooms. I find a teenage trans street artist. We make out selfishly. In the dreams, I'm a little gayer than in waking life. Often in water, surprisingly toppy though I never did finish lining up the straws. So what would you do as a parish priest in the 1780s in protest over the salt tax? A scruffy Jacques Rue bound to himself dreams of property as an athletic lover. Patrick, you dreamt of the CUNY library on fire. You dove in heroically to save Stalin's copy of capital. Although it seems pretty certain that he never even read it. Still, Ruthie arrives to congratulate you for doing the right thing. Then in the same week, you dreamt of a mass meeting of the left, an old school gymnasium or auditorium. I'm editorializing here but I can see this combination general assembly or historical materialism gathering. White walls, movement egos. Everyone's sitting on the floor in their million debates. David Harvey in his 80s, addressing the assembly says something finally that gets him canceled. A chorus of hundreds shouts and exits the dream. But you'd been given a job as his minder. The unendurable task falls to you of explaining the debacle to the confused and sad Harvey. He doesn't fully understand why or how he fucked up. Then you took him back to the house you were renting together, comforted him and put him to bed, logged into Grindr and got caught mid fucking the veranda with your app hookup, though not by David himself. I'd pay good money to see the caucus theater, the burning library, Stalin's unread marks. Once you starred in a slightly too cinematic dream that I had in which a bearded Trudeau junior arranged in an end of history maneuver for Ottawa to be secretly populated by robots. They moved with precision through different parts of the city. He hoped nobody would notice and maybe nobody would have without Patrick your role in the dream. You hack the robots. Such they stop moving and start shouting horrible shouts. Making such a tremendous noise that they end up end the peaceable and frankly boring capital where nothing moves except speculation at the speed of hoisting bitumen out of the ground. Now it's a place of total noise and chaos. Shouting robot shouts. A noise show in a barn somewhere made public like a social wage. Cam has a Mertzbo shirt from a show that caused him nerve damage. I like to wear it and pretend I'm the boyfriend. A punching bag for Tyrannosaurus sound waves. Though really I protect my delicate ears. Patrick, I'm a sap for pretty shit. Brecht and our toe make beauty suspect as it should be and that's their real point of contact. Now my broken doorbell is hissing at the mouth like a robot in Trudeau Junior's House of Commons or a parish priest urging arms over the salt tax. Ottawa has shed its clothes of bureaucratic perfection. In the dream the shouting robots allowed something to unlock elsewhere since Ottawa here and always a city of squares was consumed by its forever droning puppets and nobody died and nobody died. Optimism. Well, I think that's funny. I'm being dialectical so you don't have to. I lived with a guy who said it won't be a good revolution if I survive it. Fighting the people's war in Patterson, New Jersey. Crisis escalated me out of that place and into the expensive hovel near the Home Depot with the roaches and the infuriating smell. The one long lasting roommate and aging beauty and a spy for the landlord. Remember how I lived with Steven and Liam for a month to avoid her? Then Steven towered over my dreams like a nightly impresario. Here's what he had about me. I'm at a restaurant with Kay, he writes. We join a table where Margaret Mead is sitting. Kay is like, is that Margaret Mead? She starts going on super Margaret Mead type rants. She kind of looks like Joan Didion. Wait for it. She starts talking about the last words of W. H. Auden and Transphobia. Nobody's more celebratory of the erotic than trans people, I said in Steven's dream at the Margaret Mead table. Or did Margaret say it? Then I told Margaret about fucking boys' mouths on day two of affairs. Day two is kind of a Margaret Day. In Steven's write-up of the dream, so either I editorialized to Margaret Mead about dedicating the second mouth fucking day of an affair to her in quiet contemplation, like a day in the French Republican calendar dedicated to cabbage. Or she inserted herself into my todry affairs to self-dedicate mouth fucking to the memory of Margaret Mead and other Margaret's. I thought she was a Christian socialist. I mistook her for Dorothy Day. In the dream, Steven's holding me and spooning me. He feels deep platonic love and then, quote, K is also W. H. Auden and I'm crying because I love him so much and I can't speak. W. H. Auden is trans like poetry is a way of happening. Patrick says I'm reanimating his interest in aesthetics, on a feet kitten he'd long since drowned. Auden's last words are a kind of stuttering monologue about beauty and gratitude throughout which he gradually loses coherence. There, Steve, did I get it right? Thank you. Thank you. This next poem was published in Noah Ross's extraordinary magazine based. And I'm just, I'm really in awe of the curation. Let me see, what do you need to know about it? Before he was an activist or an organizer and got famous for yelling at the government, Larry Kramer was a writer who was, among other things, nominated for an Oscar. He didn't win. He wanted to. And he wrote a novel. He wrote a novel that is very long and I think it's just darling. And he wrote in 1978 and it's called Faggots. Has anybody read it? One person in this room, two people? Two people, two people in this room have read Faggots by Larry Kramer. You're not missing much. It did get him socially ostracized by people who were like, why are you talking about me? Like he was not popular after this point, but he was just decisively uninvited from things. But one imagines he was quite proud of himself. I remember the last speech he gave was in like 2019 and it was at the Queer Liberation March in New York and he just starts yelling at us about how prep is making us do all kinds of bad things like have sex. And it's like, Larry, you have been the same for probably 80 years. Never change, you're not gonna. Anyways, this is called Trannies by Larry Kramer. Trannies by Larry Kramer. One, in 1978, Larry Kramer wrote the novel Trannies. It's a realist depiction of the modern bourgeois transsexual, all four or 500 of them. Every character is introduced by her profession in college pedigree like Enter Bunny, 35, of glamazon proportions, with honors from Columbia, an editorship at FSG, and a view of the East River from her Kent Avenue Williamsburg apartment. This is really where the New York thing starts to show. So forgive me in advance. Can I stand here? Is that okay? Will the camera follow me? No, you want me here, okay. Ooh, I've been chasen. I've been put back in line. They are all unearthly shades of beautiful, except the very wealthy and the occasional very poor. They boast vanity in proportion to how beautiful they are, and they all have time on their hands to scheme, stup, fall in and out of love, and mostly to party, which they do with the religious devotion of wives wrapping their hair for mass. Kramer lifts the trannies' arms over their heads and wriggles them into beaded stone or feathered garments. He works sweat onto their stately brows. He washes them douche, epilate and fuck. Mostly fuck, they're very proficient. Their insides are ribbons of satin. Their hands and mouths are trained for Olympic feats. Some of them top and those trannies are in high demand, both among the chasers who flock like flightless birds around them and to other trannies of the satiny ribbon variety. They have names like Fleur-de-Lis, Babe, Fanny, Velveteen or Absolute Puss. Kramer despairs of their pursuits. Most work in arts and culture, some in law and some in medicine. A number of far-sighted trannies work in the burgeoning field of computing. What a nice decade they'll have. Some highly successful DJs, experimental synth artists, tenured track or tenured academics, painters and critics of painting and writers paid for writing round on his figure. Some just roller skate into magazines. Fame drops on them like a gag piano. A couple are genuine celebrities. The way Kramer writes, every tranny earns her limelight. They're extremely cunt and every Fleur-opruce knows it. For the purposes of this poem, Kramer isn't a tranny at all. Two, in 2016, we used to say, I'm a faggot till I die. As if someone had typesetted in small caps. We meant it metaphorically, so now you have to consider five to six trannies using a metaphor. We said it in various weights of mesh and some of us said it making choices we later thought of as youthful, like highly pigmented glitter. Actually for three to five months, we all wore tattoo chokers as a joke until it became possible to spot another tranny at a party based on her tattoo choker or your tattoo choker, which also assured both of you that you were at the right party. Then one of you nervously stripped hers off to be the less conspicuous tranny at the party that was porous enough to trannies to have at least two of you, but in mixed enough company that you formed a narrow and miscible quotient, scooped together in a corner or pointedly avoiding eye contact. Two high octane personalities holding court on opposite bar stools to competing and wrapped clusters of a non-tranny entourage. Though later, when you in the cluster at the party, you'd say, oh, I totally know who she is. We're mutuals, but we've never met IRL. Didn't she date that girl, Juno? And someone else says, which Juno? And a third adds, that girl goes by ghost now. You know her. Or maybe you are at the other kind of party whose vibrating participants are almost entirely trannies of the five to seven currently popular tranny configurations. At that party, you didn't wear the choker at all. You might be more likely to end up in the corner with the other girl assessing each other or necking like teens about to die in a B movie. You might have come with a boyfriend. If your boyfriend's trans, he's probably outside checking out the nearby grinder squares. If he sits, then you, who never pass up a chance to peacock are here to peacock. You want the trannies at the tranny party to know that you landed a prize. Say, a gauntly handsome punk boy with dirt under his fingers or a tradie snack with a chess piece of splayed wings who quietly worships you and fucks like a machine and even takes a slice of pride in appearing in the role of a party sidekick while your charisma builds to Earth mother proportions. In that case, the girl glancing almost involuntarily in your direction, maybe plotting weather and how to make out with your cisgender boy candy to prove that she can even to spirit him into the bathroom at mood ring. This party could be anywhere, but it's probably at mood ring or swap in the, you know, like divey beloved, but like Oakland bar that you guys go to. Whatever that one is. Testing his particular devotion to you versus his general attachment to form and genre, in this case of a way fish girl in a slip sucking his cock in a bar bathroom without a toilet seat. In the tranny terms of engagement, that checks out as does holding a grudge against that bitch forever or waltzing into reassert control and letting go of her indulge, of her infraction with an almost tyrannical indulgence. If on the other hand, you came stag to either the tranny or the non-tranny party, you probably checked out the available goods like Madeline Khan picking her stable in history of the world part one, pitching herself higher and higher while the camera rolls on its dolly down a line of plump Roman asses. And in that case too, you actively stunt on the competition. Either is the tranny who's had the most tranny work done, in which case you're wearing a garment flushing up to your front to leave no question whether or not your tuck is a permanent install or as a tranny who has the self-possession and or bone structure not to care. In this arms race, nobody gets out alive and nobody wants to, at least of all the trannies themselves. But why did we say it? For some of us, faggot applied as a straightforward fact. If anyone can be described as an actually existing faggot. We grasped it with a sense of finally succeeding in looking like others. And we felt that the empirical faggots among us, trading loose Sullivan buttons and approaching leather like monks in their cells might practice matins, earned their occasional smugness. Others tripped into a pleasant objection which they hadn't known to lay claim to before and which clung so tightly to their pastel lipsticks, makeup stashes and mullets fresh out of the box that they found after a while they couldn't shake it loose. Still others set it with a firm possessiveness over willfully discarded flesh, living or attempting to live the aspirations of an eclipsed category like crazy queens who went too far. To us, it sounded like something out of Larry Kramer's faggots which holds in juicy contempt the outsized characters mostly black who won't de-drag into boy names and faces not even in the meat rack, the naval of Kramer's personal faggot hell. In Kramer's calculus, is it more faggoted to be on femme until you get properly railed or to clutch after a sexless but infinitely more glamorous state like going full time? He dodges the question and heads back to his golden chair. Those of us who could be described as non-empirical faggots, faggots not of this world but the next, said what we said out of A, a desperate attachment to sin, which we believed in and which faggot with its air of willful depravity appeared to offer better than the definitely more pornified tranny. B, haughty self-preservation or C, sunburned contempt for former lovers still pumping blood at Golden Boys USA. Oh, I made it sound like a gym. We held in equal contempt the chasers who secretly believed that wanting to fuck us made them kind of gay. So you could say our former lovers refused to see in us the phantasm that our current lovers palpated and in exemplary tranny tradition, we splited them both, wrenching where possible to come out of their bodies and sending up our fervent prayers to see them buried up to their necks in hell's hot sand, like plaintive NPCs in a video game level we could unlock, beat and leap behind while they spawned, brunched, perished and spawned again. Three, faggots by Larry Kramer is the highly religious and basically devout book. I'm almost tempted to say Catholic in its rapturous attention to the body, the fetish that it makes out of its many beautiful corpses, though faggots is also largely a satire of a gay Jewish man edging on 40 and broad outline similar to Kramer himself. I mean, he's got an Oscar. Faggots has a worshipful attachment to the male sex. So worshipful that in writing his carnival of bodies, worming, panting and pushing their way into an inferno dressed up as Behrkind, Kramer nearly been entirely neglect to add a couple of girls and the ones who crash land in his novel come in two flavors. Jewish, wealthy, old and touchy, indigent, black, clever and recognizably trans. For his part, Kramer probably grouped the latter in with faggot extremity. So it's likely, although he wrote us into his ungenerous cosmos that Larry Kramer didn't know from trannies. His fools lined the curb to get into hell with their Kramer's Oscar winning self-insert dutifully tiptoes like a pilgrim absent Virgil. Horny, sober, sad and ISO, the epiphany that he eventually trawls out of a river of piss. All while his screaming queens gleefully descend the rungs of an increasingly scatological underworld. Kramer is a Dante of other people's shit. Part map maker of downward mobility, part vices wrapped chronicler, coughing up a pressed pill and taking revenge on the fortunate who snubbed him in youth and in age would go on to landscape his Hudson Valley home by making them party upside down in a toilet bowl. If it's a swirly, why does everyone think it's fun? Probably mass social hysteria. Their names, Boo Boo Bronstein, Randy Dildo, Bilbo, Dom Dom, Dinky Adams, didn't make it up, really are childish as if skimmed from the age when toddlers learn both language and bowel control and before they turn into trannies. If you're a hygienist of the pines, everything's a cavity. If you're a Latter-day Augustine, Long Island looks like Carthage. That jeed out twink on the helipad might be God's plan. As might be the incomplete douche job you pulled last night or accidentally polishing your cousin's monster knob. Lots daughters passed up Sodom for something more delicious. You get your rocks off and power up today's harangue and when post-publication, the bitter disco perverts stop inviting you to the nightlife you love to hate, as indeed they stopped inviting Kramer, you take comfort in feeling allegory churn around you like a slightly less satisfying anal wall. Reading faggots is like riding a tour bus through a circuit party where everybody's shitting in each other's boots except Kramer, who piously goes in the bushes and comes out the other side a changed man without a Gabriel or a horn to blow on, tapping at the gates of heaven's excerpts while behind him the despoiled souls on the tranny faggot continuum stroke their corrupted flesh forever in Gomorrah and feel basically okay. For you try to write fact and instead you wrote faggot. God made you do it. Like he made RuPaul tweet the train's flag and atoned for it perpetually by indulging transsexuals draped in blue and pink pastels like babies wrapped in cotton candy. God set you up to fail and when you took a Xanax after the underwear party in the grove and it bobbed in your throat like a buoy that too is God. Keeping you awake and making you look like an ass in front of your slightly square boyfriend, the trans one who last time we saw him was checking out the nearby grinder squares and who when the swallowed Xanax melted and made you walk like an uncoordinated puppet into bed remembered and cited this incident in his litany of reasons to dump you. Though technically anticipating that he had fallen out of love with you in part but not entirely because of your predictably chaotic use in part but not entirely because he believes that you were laying down a mile of pipe. You got there first springing the jump on him when he got back from a car trip to Montreal with his FTM bros and complaining of his inattention like a creature who lives to be sensuous and adored under continuously stained cheeks. We never see each other anymore. You said through heavy tears and then you made sure it was true. The runny eyeliner is not God but the bellowing volume you hit when you come gets pretty close. So does the ripping your tights nestles at the crotch. The one months later you got your rave date to enlarge to bite and tear at and eventually to finger fuck you through in an anonymous cafe on Nostrand Avenue near Sugar Hill Disco Tech which first opened its doors in 1979 when Kramer party despite himself in which while you and your dates robbed on Molly and you deep started him on the dance floor cushioned your delicate knees. He's straight. So under other circumstances you might wonder what his damage is when if ever he might begin to suspect the degeneracy of pleasure seeking in the way that you seek it and whether he'll resent himself for seeking it with a distracted tranny or rather recommit to a profligate non-natal thrill and plays it on his mental list of tremendous inventions like insulin, running water, light rail, prep, naloxone, the moon landing, solar power, nylon rope and LSD. Under other circumstances you might wonder if and when he clocked you what he believes that says about him whether he'll be weird about it and whether when he tells his friends he'll highlight or disguise how he fucked a tranny right there where God could see and the dance floor and the DJ you might even have thought oh am I still a faggot theologically and doesn't matter even when he thinks so too but you aren't under other circumstances you're high. And a sex change is not a canticle. It's not a canto. It's not Carthage or Balzac. Actually it might be a little Balzac. It's not Delaney, but it's not not Delaney. It's not Andrew Holleran. The little Larry Kramer. Do you think he ever thought about it? I'm not saying Larry Kramer was a tranny. Not even an edge case. I meant it when I said in this poem trannies by Larry Kramer, Kramer isn't a tranny at all. But do you think he considered the idea? And if he did maybe the thought passed through him with a shutter like you might imagine closing a window on your hand or maybe he felt a tug in his groin like a kid smoking his first cigarette and thinking wow, thank you. Thank you so much. Okay that was awesome. What a show. W.H. Alden is trans like poetry is a way of happening. So thank you so much. Kay's Book is for sale up at front with our friends from Pegasus. Thank you all for coming. Our next reading is going to be 12.7, I believe, December 7th with Berkley's own. Jesse Nathan is right there. You can review this reading on YouTube when it goes up in a couple of weeks and there's a sign up list for our email service. So thank you all for coming by Kay's Book, support poetry and do crimes.