Being the Fit Audience for My Own Drag Performance

Much or even most of my poetry is autoerotic - a celebration of my sexiness to myself. 

When I write verse about my own prettiness, there is a perplexing question of audience. 

Society makes erotic self-enjoyment shameful and queer -- I, a biological male, enjoy in myself what turns me on in a woman.

Because my writing about my sexuality is queer and may be regarded as shameful, I assume it might be embarrassing to my family, so I feel pressure to publish it only in a way that keeps it hidden. 

In this time when gender-policing has gained the office of US President, to openly publish my autoerotic poetry might seem to require more courage than I have.

There's also a question of discretion--who would really want to read it?

My writing about my self-admiration probably does me very little credit with almost anyone, so should I not hide it completely by refraining from publishing at all?

But erotic self-admiration may be my deepest truth. 

The sensual and sensuous part of my life is the most joyous, and the joy I have in others is partly a sense of sharing their own autoerotic feelings.

But I am much too bashful to have sex with everyone in the world, and my own individual life will come to an end, so I need to have imaginative contact with others--and with eternity -- through empathy (well, I AM an empath!).

It's tricky because it can't just be subjugation of others to my own libido--the problem with shamanistic poetry--it's rapey--to publish my poetry on Substack would be problematic in that way.

I have to enjoy myself erotically without imposing myself on others, and this fact well explains my reluctance to submit my work for publication.

As I wrote when I was seventeen years old:

    I am not a finger
    Irritating by probing
    The surface of some body.

The crucial empathy that in my dreams might enable me to share my writing depends on a conviction that my self-enjoyment can be symbolically (synecdochally?) related to the key to joy for everyone--the root, sacrum, solar plexus, and heart (not to mention throat, third eye, and crown) of biological existence.

I am the fit audience (few, for sure!) for my own work. 

I can share pieces at readings and so on, some of which may be funny and entertaining, and even give people printed books--though I rarely do.

I have published eleven Yokel Song selections on my old blog--the blog gets hits, but I have no idea from whom, except that most of the recent hits are from the US.

Please Hit Me With the Milk!

Grazie, Miss Groby and James Thurber.
metonymy - attribute for owner
synecdoche - part for whole

My feet make me amazingly happy!
Are they a metonymy
or a synecdoche?

Well, a synechdoche would be
one member of my anatomy
for my entire identity—one amazingly happy

tootsie-wootsie
for Yours Happily
themselves? A metonymy

would be both their feetsie-weetsie
for the complete adorability
of the world itself—our amazingly happy

Yokel-world with both their podo-parts
attached. We’ll be gone one day
but our fairy feet will still be doing the Metonymy

Waltz with their partner Eternity.
How sweet that will be!
How amazingly happy
to be a synecdoche!