Sloughing Off the Gentlemanly Sports

By Julian Talamantez Brolaski

What makes that fox so grabby for the stars,

Begging like boys do? I meant to fully

Gild that lily, till less like virile Mars

It’s clepd the pansiest of pansy,

The caducous calyx of a poppy.

Cuz, step into these arms where you belong

A coup at the prospect of this lording,

A gleam in the gloom with serpentine song—

The phosphorescent tide’s mine to lavish upon.

O stop me at the very vestibule—

Before whom, and in what habit I speak

I watched them use their meat to call me fool.

Someone’s cage is aching at the seams,

The noisome idle falls to dirty dreams—

Thus the flummoxed drunk of xem will coil

And I’ll learn the real, or it’ll learn me,

Making free with the Italian model

The single summer shower mano à mano.

The proverbial number of angels

That could’ve fit on the head of a pin

Are crying to the myriad angles,

This glassy labyrinth we happened in

Will not undo the errancer I’ve been.

Soon the swancrest, the feedcrest, my distress

Will feign to fuck the furlonged mannequin—

At what—punishing pace we undress

This crapshoot idée fixe and its yahoo mistress.

Fictive trees harsh the billow of my cape,

All kind of lovers crashed rubbernecking.

The fishes on the frontispiece were draped

In your leafy worded velocity.

You whisper, London has no more fog for me

To whit, my darksome peachpit! storms above

—A buckler to them that walks uprightly—

Will not enforce this porno hand from glove

Or diminish one jott my vegetable love.

Source: Advice for Lovers (City Lights Books, 2012)

Biography

Poet Julian T. Brolaski is the author of the collections gowanus atropolis (2010) and Advice for Lovers (2011). Xir chapbooks include Hellish Death Monsters (2001), The Daily Usonian (2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary (2005), and Buck in a Corridor (2008). Brolaski’s work often explores transgender and gender-variant experiences through linguistics experimentation, including the use of gender-neutral pronouns, etymology, and . . .

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