there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don’t make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

text: e. e. cummings
image: subjects, photographer unknown, Germany 1930s
via miss magnolia thunderpussy/flickr

image: photographer, sitters unknown
text: excerpt, Easter Parade, Irving Berlin, 1933

Click for musical accompaniment:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

…I was stationed at Tinker Field in Oklahoma, and assigned a job in the command headquarters on the airbase. Evenings and weekends, I was now free to go into Oklahoma City, and when I was checking out the men’s room of one of the big movie houses downtown, I met two soldiers who were just hanging around in the lounge. They were show-offs, and when they saw me watching them, they both whipped powder puffs from their regulation shirt pockets and flamboyantly powdered their noses, which, considering that they were in uniform, I found hilarious. It was my first introduction to camp, though I still hadn’t learned the word…

…I also went out drinking at a tavern with with a bunch of regular army men from my barracks…

…One night, a master sergeant joined us from the next booth. A baby-faced youth with a southern accent who smoked cigars… Glenn, as it turned out, lived in one of the private rooms at the end of my barracks reserved for noncoms, and I began joining the bull sessions in his room, during which he tied trout fishing flies, his favorite hobby…

…I knew he liked me when he gave me one of his trout flies, which I pinned to my shirt. Sometimes we would walk around the base at night, he’d light a big cigar, and in the darkness I’d be moved by the brilliant desert sky to philosophize, which he would tolerate with grown up amusement, though he was only nineteen himself.

We soldiers were transported back and forth between the airbase and Oklahoma City in the backs of personnel carrier trucks, and it was always a dash to catch the last run around 11:30 P.M.  One night, after a double date with a couple of civilian girls we worked with at HQ, so many GIs piled into the truck that I had to sit on Glenn’s lap, and in the pitch blackness, hanging onto each other as the vehicle bounced over potholes, his lips nuzzled mine and buyddyhood turned into a love affair.

Text: Excerpt from Gay In the Army, by Edward Field (b. 1924),
from a longer excerpt which appears in Gay American Autobiography,
Edited by David Bergman
Image: Army Buddies, 1944, subjects/photographer unknown
via miss magnolia thunderpussy/ipernity
Music: My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time, 1945
music by Vic Mizzy, lyrics by Manny Curtis,
performed by the Les Brown Orchestra with vocals by Doris Day.

                                                                  i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

text: ee cummings
image: subjects/photographer unknown,
via varones/flickr

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
     Half of the night with our old friend
          Who’d showed us in the end
     To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
          Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
          Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
          Your instep to my heel,
     My shoulder-blades against your chest.
     It was not sex, but I could feel
     The whole strength of your body set,
       Or braced, to mine,
          And locking me to you
     As if we were still twenty-two
     When our grand passion had not yet
          Become familial.
     My quick sleep had deleted all
     Of intervening time and place.
          I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Text: The Hug, Thom Gunn
Image: Photographer, subjects unknown,
via Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy/ipernity

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example–
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people–
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery–
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast. . .
Let’s say we’re at the front–
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind–
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet–
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
–you have to feel this sorrow now–
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

Text: ‘On Living,’ Nazim Hikmet
Translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing
Image: Photographer, sitters unknown; via Osvaldo E/flickr

O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my food nourish’d me more — and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy — and with the next, at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast — and that night I was happy.

Text: Walt Whitman, When I Heard at the Close of the Day
No. 11, Calamus, Leaves of Grass, 1860
Image: Photographer/subjects unknown, via varones/flickr

Is it possible
to be tattooed
by someone’s soul?

Only with eyes closed
can I trace outlines,
a slight raise on my unmarked skin
(even in creases: inner elbows,
between fingers and toes).
The designs always familiar
but too abstract to identify.

I mean, can one be widowed
by the living?

Carting the blank stone
from days into dreams
toward an open grave
in my front and back yards,
basement, bathtub.
Ever eluded by the body,
not the scent.

And if there is someone else one day,
will he sense this presence?

The fine slip beneath
my rumpled clothes.
The railing I reach for
even on shallow stairs.

Will you, Christopher,
be the mosquito netting
draping my honeymoon bed,
swaying almost imperceptibly in the dark
but allowing in breezes
that comb the hairs on my arms,
legs, chest?

Image: 1930s, photographer/sitter unknown
via DCwooten/flickr
Text: The Slip, Michael Montlack
Poem published in Ganymede, Issue 5, Oct. 2009

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Text: e.e. cummings
Image: Photographer and subjects unknown
via picassoswoman/flickr

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market–
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

Text: Perfection Wasted, John Updike
Photographer: Herbert Tobias, ‘Le Flore,’ Paris, 1952