for Butch-Femme.com

I had a dream.

I was laying on my back
in a damp ditch outside of the walls of my beloved city,
a place of great feasts
where I once sat at the head of the table.

My terrible longing for home
tethered me to this familiar earth
and I could not stand and walk away.

I shivered in a bloodied torn shirt,
wet with the spit of strangers
and my own tears.

I stared up at the stars,
remembering youthful vision,
a time when this ground was nothing
but a barren field.
But I imagined music
when I looked out across the empty horizon
because I could picture all of you lovers dancing.

There is not one brick I deplore laying,
not one hour of labor I regret.
I forgive your spit and your scorn
and will always remember you dancing.

I am going to begin again,
with love.

—————

rhon drinkwater © 2008

This is about my web site Butch-Femme.com, a community I miss very much. My ex-wife changed all the admin passwords and locked me out when we divorced. She’s never said why she did this. Reposting this July 2008 and its still not resolved.

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | 2 Comments »

Mountains away lives a poet
who cares whether roses live or die,
who knows fallen petals
are not trash but tears.

She scrubs her heart red and raw
so the scars won’t set.
She swallows the sun for her very own smile
and takes snapshots to prove it.

Glinty little brass key
sweaty from my palm
clicks quietly into her quaint lock,
just as I knew it would.

The ancient door that is her will
moans low as I push myself against it.
Never heard such a sacred sound,
nor been wounded with such longing.

The wind howls so chaotic inside her
feathers are torn from birds,
and the powdery ashes of old hopes
swirl to sting my teary eyes.

Her heart is astonishing radiance.
Need as pure as a pink newborn
crying so fiercely there is no sound
until she gulps that first sting of air.

————

rhon drinkwater © 2008

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | No Comments »

everything is turning green
and the blue sky knows all
i am strangling my blooming heart
to quash its tender secrets

you are cocking your head at me
tiny bird
with any sudden movement
you belong to the sky

what visions lay under your eyelids
flying or dying or love
when my hand on your breast
slows your fast beating heart

————

rhon drinkwater © 2008

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | No Comments »

I had a dream.

I was laying on my back
in a damp ditch outside of the walls of my beloved city,
a place of great feasts
where I once sat at the head of the table.

My terrible longing for home
tethered me to this familiar earth
and I could not stand and walk away.

I shivered in a bloodied torn shirt,
wet with the spit of strangers
and my own tears.

I stared up at the stars,
remembering youthful vision,
a time when this ground was nothing
but a barren field.
But I imagined music
when I looked out across the empty horizon
because I could picture all of you lovers dancing.

There is not one brick I deplore laying,
not one hour of labor I regret.
I forgive your spit and your scorn
and will always remember you dancing.

I am going to begin again,
with love.

———

© rhon drinkwater 2008

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | 3 Comments »

voyage unleashed & sails flapping
you billowed the curtains
you soaked the sheets
& set sail my exquisite yearning

slow ancient underwater movements
distort old sorrow & new hope so profoundly
dumb love holds its breath
when nipples are bitten, lips swollen, & belly taut

i swam drunk in your churning current
swilled your potent beauty foolishly
dove heroically down to your coolest depths
& drowned in your shadowy tenderness

sails torn & rigging cracked & rudder bent
i woke shivering & alone on the noontide shore
unclenched my waterlogged fist to stare at
the cherished gem, proof, plunder

but your heart vanished & all I held was a tiny dark stone
plucked blindly from the bottom of the ocean
now i roam the lonely black sea longing for lost treasure
& even night itself feels forsaken for ever having embraced you

….

© rhon drinkwater 2008

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | 1 Comment »

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” my mother said on the phone, “about what you said your grandfather did to you when you were 5? I have been racking my brain and I just can’t accept it.”

My heart went cold. I shut off all emotion.

“I remember when I was a little girl,” Mom said, “I saw these green reflective glasses glowing in my window at night. The bogey man had a long coat and a hat and he wore a Dick Tracy hat low over his eyes. When I started to cry, my daddy would come to my bed and comfort me. I don’t know if it was a dream or what. That’s all I can remember.”

He always wore a fedora. I knew my grandpa was the bogey man but I didn’t dare speak of it when I was young. Partly because I wished it wasn’t true, but mostly because I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me. Grandpa wasn’t the only one to break my heart, just the first one, the one I loved the most. That’s why he haunted my thoughts so.

“Don’t worry about it. Just forget about it,” I said. My mother is fragile and I am always protecting her.

I remembered one dawn in my teens, Grandpa was in the kitchen making coffee while I lay shaking on the couch in the dark front room, wrapped in one of my grandmother’s quilts. My mother tiptoed in from the guest room and lay with me, holding me tight. She knew.

After my grandma died, it became apparent that the old man was senile. Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t recall the names of his own children some days. The day he forgot how to drive home, the police called my mother. She asked me to pack up his things and bring him down to her house.

He had no idea who I was. He didn’t know where we were going. His mind a peaceful, blank slate and he fell against my shoulder and snored loudly as I drove. The three hairs on the dome of his shiny skull repulsed me.

“Did you remember to bring his photo album?” My mom asked. She wanted to sit with her father and look at family pictures, help him remember.

“No, I’m sorry, Mom. I clean forgot.”

It was true.

Everyday Élan Vital, Highlights | 6 Comments »

The hair buzzed so close to the boy’s skull made his thin neck and the jut of his ears appear especially vulnerable. He closed one eye and pretended to look down the sight of the heavy rifle while his father hissed instructions.

“Back your shoulder up to that tree there so it don’t kick you back!”

The boy stepped backwards awkwardly. His new hunting boots were a gift from his father and they were far too large. He kept his eye trained on the sight even though he saw nothing.

“Git ‘er now, boy! Gotdammit!”

The boy pulled his finger on the trigger but it did not budge. This confused him and he lifted his head for a second, pulling harder. The rifle exploded in his hands with a deafening crack that shoved his shoulder into the fat trunk of the tree and knocked the air from his lungs. His eyes were wide and his mouth hung open. The burnt smell of sulfur reached his nostrils. He couldn’t see the deer.

“Score!” His father grabbed the boy by the collar and tore out of the brush, galloping toward the field.

It wasn’t a shock to see such an animal felled, lying stark against the snow. He witnessed his father and his hunting buddies hacking away at the carcass of many a deer in their backyard, dressing them for the freezer. He even played with the bloody stump of a lower leg once, moving the joint back and forth while staring down into the marrow. The heat rose in him as he approached his kill. Fear of his father, the swelling of pride, and shame for the praise that he secretly ached for combined to flush his face red.

His father knelt at the body of the young doe and dug his finger into the hole in her neck, buried to the knuckle. “Sure shot, son!”

The boy never expected her eyes to be so beautiful behind their lashes. She lifted her head and let out a hoarse honk that sprayed red snot across his boots, and then she laid her head back down on a raspberry snowcone of blood. Her pink tongue lay exposed against her muzzle.

The very moment his father reached up with a steaming red finger and smeared her essence across his cheek, the boy’s heart went hollow. This moment would replay in his mind all of his life. Every time he felt like less than a man, his heart would go hollow.

Everyday Élan Vital, Highlights | 2 Comments »

When I paint, I begin with the bones of bare line, fleshing out the image with rich layers of gossamer thin glazes. It is a metaphor for my life.

I was born in the nitty-gritty, and I kinda liked it there, actually. The known world is naturally divided into perimeters of class and caste, and for your own safety, you don’t put your hand on an electrified fence. That’s all the meaning you need.

So I know most poetry is fucking bullshit, okay, but somehow I came into this life seeking beauty, even if it would wound me. Even when the human condition turns ugly and cruel, I try to keep my eyes wide because I know the contrast will only serve beauty more exquisitely still. My love of it has been “the precious pearl”… all of my days.

My mother taught me to yank dreams out by the roots. Our ability to bear the brunt of injustice assures us that true caliber is measured in endurance. Our children are not dreamers. We are survivors, she said.

I felt my mother’s words so acutely at the opera. I had just witnessed thousands of red rose petals raining on the stage as Puccini’s Butterfly stabbed herself. That blade pierced my own heart. In the lobby of the theatre, I saw several people of a different class flick their eyes down to my feet. Looking for fear on my shoes? Surprised I am not crippled? I would rather find courage than face regret.

Lately, the silence rising in my throat is choking me and I can feel the stories kicking the back of my ribs, waiting to be born. I try to make this dream smaller so there’s no need to slay it. I am trying to find the bare bones so I can begin.

Highlights | No Comments »

This is an oldie, but I will share it again. Gather round, inverts. Daddy gawn tell a story.

Back in the primordial olden days… when the internet was only gray or blue, and blinking text was hiiiigh tech like an Etch-a-Sketch… long before I had ever glimpsed the sassy shashay of Miss Sweet Bumps and long before I tattooed her name all crooked on my arm… I decided on the spur of the moment to go on a date with a local Sweet Sugar Smack I encountered online. What the hell, right? Yes. *Hell*. Hellish!

Was the blind date my type? Weeeelllll…. Like my friend Austin once said: "Does the Pope shit in the woods?!??" Still, there was no doubt I was going to be polite. Only I dint yet know I would be Driving Miss Crazy. I shoulda just hit a fricken drivethru and ended this rendezvous with a taco and a packet of hot sauce. But no.

Yeah. Turns out this girl was some fruity pebbles figment of some infernal imaginary everlasting fireball! Shhhhhoooooooooot! This one was wired in such a corn flaky fashion, she accidentally proved there was no god. Cracked wheat, and not even stacked sweet. You know what I am sayin.

Mmmmhmmm. HoneyBunchesofOats was a bit of an enthusiast. She tried to go all koo-koo on my cocoa puffs and molester my stone, but I proceeded to circumlocute to the right when she was circumnavigating to the left. I was all: “NO! You cannot possess me. You cannot lick my chakra. You cannot turn my cap around forward!” When I finally got the succubus out of my home a few hours later, I hid in the hallway as flat and taut against the wall as a fat Boootch can. Meanwhile every soundtrack from every scary movie ever made was playing in the background, and she was outside banging on my bathroom window, hollerin and carryin on about how she loved me! Hey, when you do me like that, my politeness slowly begins to wane, ebb and fade. In fact, when you screech like a cockeyed rice crispy freak and try to bust out my dayum windows… well, my southern hospitality pops right the hell off!

Yeh. I had to call the cops and the long arm of Johnny Law got her in a headlock. My neighbors were all standing outside in their robes with their children and their dogs and their picnic baskets and their cameras. Their accusing hetero-normative glances said, "This is what happens when the boodaggers start moving in." Pretty craptacular evening all around.

Anyways, the point of the story is… when it comes to trix, be wary of granola lesbians. Hell, I can’t recommend dating any kind of cereal! Period. Especially that off brand shredded wheat. Pay the extra fiddy cents, Good Time Charlie. You know that cheap store brand shit don’t taste right!

So… just remember ya'll — ix-nay on the chex mix-nay.

Cheerio! ~
Daddy Rhon

Disclaimer: I have nothing against granola. I like it with milk or plain.

Satire & Silliness, Highlights | 2 Comments »

In all things sensual
there are woman who are extravagant.
I cheer for a woman who rebelled,
an ample and buttery and fertile and ripe
woman who luxuriates in her own rich velvet.
She is a fat cat in the sun.
I prefer the precious plump dimpled knees
of a baby girl just big enough to be cupped in my hands
— heart full, mouth delicious, belly wanting.
I prefer that grand diva with cheeks plump and proud,
parting her lush opera curtains.
She is a luxury liner cutting ancient seas.
The woman I love does not
politely nibble life like a salad.
She is desire unbound and voracious
and she knows this.
I love a woman who is fat
because she allowed herself to be free.

The Saga of Swagger, Highlights | 4 Comments »