Risky Essays

When I get away from my writing projects for a short while, I always start thinking I may be done with them for good. Then when I do return to them, I find that they are fun and that there's lots to do. It's easy under the current abusive right-wing regime to get into a hiding mode. My poetry reveals my autoerotic drag-dancing self -- which the regime would consider pathological -- and as such my poetry sometimes feels shameful to me, and it seems rude and even dangerous to share it. So, I'm either in a hiding mode, avoiding my writing work, or in a selfie-drag-dancing mode, relishing my writing work. I think I have finally decided not to publish it on Substack -- it is quite adequately published on my blog, where I don't ask people to subscribe to it. That really does seem properly discreet. I myself am my poetry's audience fit, though few -- even though my collections are organized so that the "shameful" poems are mostly confined to Pretty Yokel.   Woke ...

When I get away from my writing projects (the Yokel Songs, for example), it's easy for me to get into a mental frame of thinking I may be done with them forever.  But that's just the old familiar hiding phase. A force sinisterly allied with the current abusive right-wing regime makes me suppress myself, both my erotic self-love and the energy that I put into poetry. In the hiding phase, poetry is shameful -- it's a kind of drag-dancing for myself. I can easily become ashamed and fearful -- this shame going back to my childhood hatred of my own feet, which by my late adolescence had become erotic love of my own feet. Throughout my school years I was subjected to gender policing that made me fear and deny gay tendencies in myself. I had no concept of trans-ness, of wanting to be a woman, until late in life when I was asked to write my pronouns on a name badge -- they-them felt much better than he-him. I really do fear that the regime may decide to exterminate people like me -...