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Frank leaving me bereft, coiling, somehow so gay isn‘t it, wanting to stay drunk on friendship, impossibilities, language shared always shared. No more language to come here just the poem to read.
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Hi Jak! It’s asha, I wanted to say that when I read this I thought this is exactly what I think about when I read your writing. You are my poetry of a new friend. I’ve known you only through your writing for so long, and from that I know that you are one of the people I want to be friends with forever. Your friendship is even better than your writing - if that can even be said LOVE YOU - Asha
9h ago
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РОЕМ Instant coffee with slightly sour cream in it, and a phone call to the beyond which doesn't seem to be coming any nearer. "Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days" on the poetry of a new friend my life held precariously in the seeing hands of others, their and my impossibilities. Is this love, now that the first love has finally died, where there were no impossibilities? 1956
Jan 31, 2024
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After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves Ocean, don’t be afraid.  The end of the road is so far ahead  it is already behind us.  Don’t worry. Your father is only your father  until one of you forgets. Like how the spine  won’t remember its wings  no matter how many times our knees  kiss the pavement. Ocean,  are you listening? The most beautiful part  of your body is wherever  your mother’s shadow falls.  Here’s the house with childhood  whittled down to a single red tripwire.  Don’t worry. Just call it horizon & you’ll never reach it.  Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not  a lifeboat. Here’s the man  whose arms are wide enough to gather  your leaving. & here the moment,  just after the lights go out, when you can still see  the faint torch between his legs.  How you use it again & again  to find your own hands.  You asked for a second chance  & are given a mouth to empty into.  Don’t be afraid, the gunfire  is only the sound of people  trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,  get up. The most beautiful part of your body  is where it’s headed. & remember,  loneliness is still time spent  with the world. Here’s  the room with everyone in it.  Your dead friends passing  through you like wind  through a wind chime. Here’s a desk  with the gimp leg & a brick  to make it last. Yes, here’s a room  so warm & blood-close,  I swear, you will wake—  & mistake these walls  for skin.
May 7, 2024
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You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest         me, it was love for you that set me afire,      and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings                                   writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn't there              an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed?  And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn't                   you like the eggs a little different today?                 And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.
Jan 13, 2025

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‘They’re faggots. They’re writers—quelle surprise!’ I had to ask Gay’s the Word to order Castle Faggot in for me. I used a £7.99 discount token from their pay-it-forward scheme to buy it when it arrived, povo that I am. I spent that £7.99 on one pint at some Bloomsbury pub and read it all in one sitting, twisting the book upside down, inside out, trying to make sure every toff in a gilet could see what I was reading. This is one of the reasons the book is such a powerful object: it branded me. It’s by a faggot, for faggots. No hetero would be caught dead with it in his hands.  In the book’s afterword, Dennis Cooper says ‘It does everything it’s doing in three-dimensions.’ Castle Faggot is a real space, an orgy of dead faggots and an amusement park. It’s a scatological Disneyland and a place for faggots to die. It’s a book that at once inspired and destroyed my own work, took a real big shit on it. Derek, as I try to, leans into consumerism with joy and horror simultaneously, locates us in the products we buy and the sugary cereal we crave. It’s also totally absent of literary goop, full of human goop, faggot goop; it’s slender ninety pages make it the perfect artefact. He doesn’t mince words, but he’s a mincer. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be.  I hold a real space for myself in my writing and feared it came off as forced, the I character always some more handsome version of me. Derek doesn’t need to include his name for us to know what sickly disturbed fag is talking. When he does do it, it comes off as a joke. As if we didn’t already know. His input is never conceited or dishonest; he pushes out from every shit-smeared hole laughing, screaming, self-loathing. He made me better at inserting myself into my writing and inserting myself into another man. Castle Faggot isn’t just one of the most important pieces of post-AIDS writing, it’s one of the most current pieces of post-AIDS writing. It writes to a world which, honestly, didn’t really experience that tragedy, but which is littered with its bodies. Derek McCormack saw a dead faggot and thought, I’m gonna write on this, or I’m gonna write in this, or I’m gonna write with this. The whole book is a dead faggot crying out against our century, lost in an amusement park, how is this even possible? It’s a mass grave of a book. At some point in the book you have to flip it upside-down, be reminded you’re holding an object; but you’re also forced to read backwards, rescind into a haunted past of faggotry and debauchery. He plays physical tricks with his work that make him a sort of architect. Nothing has ever been written like it, but we need more, and that’s why this book is so important. It sets a precedent. Derek takes the faggy artists of old—the fin-de-siecle writers, or ‘fag-de-siecle’—and transforms them into post-AIDS monuments, puerile shit-filled replicas. It’s a children’s book for faggots. It’s the children’s book I always needed as a child but didn’t know I did. It’s a book that reminds us that, as faggots, we’re already dead; but in being written, existing, it encourages us to go on and create. It’s like the faggots’ nuclear bomb, our weapon of mass seduction. It’s hot enough to melt Walt Disney. Castle Faggot is, to me, the logical progression of all faggot art, the consolidation. It’s an exhibition piece on communal existence with AIDS and a call for young faggot writers to acknowledge that they come from a lineage of shit and death, that it’s inescapable, but that there are new things to be done. It explodes traditional narrative expectations and arrives at some other end of the novel, some new territory. It faggots the writing process and the book itself is a dead fucking faggot.  When I finished reading Castle Faggot I held it the whole way home. On the tube I wore it like a band t-shirt. By this point, though, I didn’t just want to be branded, an obvious faggot where I’ve before been called ‘the straightest person’ gym bro in my art class had ever seen; I wanted to be a model for Derek’s work, for someone, anyone, some faggot, to look it up, read it, and start writing, start breaking the mould.
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Bob, I don’t know how you do it but my body responds in this fucked up way to your language. It’s actually one of the greatest feats in artistic history I think. I want your mind in mine and I bet you were a great fuck back in your day.
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Children are brewing. Their amniotic fluid is hostile architecture.