Ian Hamilton in Florida
Gainesville, 1991
Think again, Charles James,
some vile queen hissed at me, at the bar.
So what if my gown
was not so much? The nineties
were still the eighties then,
and by that I mean
shoulder-padded, moussed, and bedazzled.
I wished that Derek,
my blond fucker, my stalker,
would please stop, or stop by.
I lived in a clutch
of pink or blue apartments, gender
meets architecture—
I lived, it’s true, in the pink.
A big primeval bug
was painted over
in the far corner of my bedroom.
(I hid it with lube
left over from the Gainesville
Murder Slumber Party.)
Once, the handyman
walked right in like a sexy golfer,
polyester slacks
and a white-capped, crooked grin.
I put on my En Vogue
cassette; I wanted
that kind of facial in the worst way.
He fixed everything
but, then left me for wood chips?
Fine. But here’s the point:
Though there’s little point
in poems, that year, I fell hard for yours,
Ian Hamilton:
‘It’s been a long time,’ you said,
‘I’ll race you to the sea.’
in memory
**
Randall Mann’s second collection of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, has just been published by University of Chicago Press. Read the Rumpus review.
