Thursday, September 11, 2008


Snark Lyricism

“One evening I
pulled Beauty—
down on my knees”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
A Season in Hell

Storytelling—it’s an old story.

But snark is instinctual. It’s not just a hoity-toity literati nincompoopery game storytellers play for the fun of it.

Snark goes for the jugular. That throbbing pulsating life-important vein next to your carotid artery—bulging out the side of your straining hickie-bruised purple-tattooed big thick neck.

Big thick muscular necks work best—like my college gym-team lover had way back when. He was built like a brick shithouse—and he had lots of slithering Adonis veins and Arturo Toscanini arteries.

I got us an apartment off campus—just to get him out of the dorm. I didn’t want any tacky competition—there were too many queenly ogling eyeballs in Huey P. Long Hall anyway. Especially in the showers—late at night.

Let’s call him Claude—the French Boy. That’s a pretty good name for him—my little New Orleans stud. He had a View Carré Venus-torso—and the view from Pompey’s head was breathtaking. I tutored him in English and paid the rent—he paid his half by being trade.

I hate to sound snarky—but like I said snark is instinctual. His athletic physique and young male magnetism—meant burning the midnight oil long into the night. He was like an exquisite moveable feast—he was delicious to look at from any angle especially looking up.

Claude Bordreaux was especially well-endowed—and he’d smirk saying it was the only thing I was interested in. He’d get snarky—when I asked for seconds. He was still virgin though—not mean and jaded yet. But even when he got snarky and wise-ass with me—that spacious Big Easy bad attitude just made things better. He was the guy who taught me one very important thing—how to definitely completely confidently be a Snark Queen.

Claude Bordreaux was a sexy Frenchmen—there were lots of them hanging around campus. Some came from the local towns, the swamps and bayous—they taught me how to suck juice from big craw-daddy heads. They taught me how to play poker on weekends—with water moccasins slithering around our feet on the dirt floor. They taught me how to crave Cajun cuisine—gumbos and jambalayas. They taught me to crave Cajun you know what—swimming in the nude with garfish and alligators snapping at my feet.

It was all very French onion soup de jour—but I needed something less primitive and more cosmopolitan. Claude Bordreaux was Creole—with a little French, Spanish and Haitian flowing thru his veins. Pretty soon it was flowing thru my veins too—I’d have these incredible Caribbean wet dreams. My Delta dreams got hopelessly seminal—and during classes my mind would wander back to the apartment.

Bordreaux spoiled me—that Freshman year. After that it was all downhill—as far as being happy with the rest of humanity was concerned. I had Bordreaux on the brain—he gave me a really bad attitude toward everything else. After Claude—everything looked down and dingy. I got bitchy and snarky—without even knowing it. My Bad Attitude—it got more & more derigeur by the inch & weekend…

Bordreaux was like a Black Hole—he sucked everything into his orbit. His orbit of pouty male beauty and sullen self-consciousness—closing his eyes because he didn’t like the look on my barracuda face… He didn’t read books—I was the one to get him thru college. I did all his homework—I got him his baccalaureate. Was he grateful?—well, kinda…

It was all Bordreaux’s fault—me ending up such a Snark Queen. He gave me my snarky Bad Attitude—he turned me into the mawkish maudlin poet I am today. It was all that nasty awful-tasting Bad Seed—too much of it just did me in. He made me do it—the Devil made me do it. He turned me into slavish self-loathing foolish bride—taken in by his nefarious troubling enfant terrible nightworld body...

Those 2 years living with him—were a long gigantic derangement of all my senses. It was my Delirium—my own personal Season in Hell. His terrifyingly exciting male sexuality—mirrored and echoed in my life. My life poem became entitled—“Gay Soliloquy.” It was all just simply awful—awfully fine.

I was truly a Foolish Virgin—every night we made love. I was totally unprepared for it—each time was totally new and shocking. Each time I got his handsome built Adonis bod in bed—his divine bridegroom beauty sent me into a delirium of jaded melodramatic despair. The next day I’d be totally snarky and bored during classes—after spending all night long sleeplessly curled up next to him.

It was then that my Snarky Muse came to me—both literally and poetically. It was my feminine subjectivity in drag—I was a male writer dressed in a woman’s voice and sensibility. I was a woman—trapped in a male’s body.

The only way to achieve libertine liberation for my lyric voice—was to dispense with the whole victim narrative. My lyric body found its multiplicity not in the multiplication of our sexual encounters—but in the intense concentration it took to know the exquisite “quivering lip” of Claude’s love each time. How I gnawed on his upper lip…

It was Bordreaux’s Lip that had profound meaning for me—but also everything else happening from the tip of his head down to his curling toes. His body was one big quivering Lip—all of it intimately connected. All his male feelings and sensations overflowing like warm oozing spit—through his teenage cornucopia quivering Lips.

But that’s when my Snarky muse stepped in—my foolish virgin bride’s mistaking Bordreaux for a Lover. He had a libertine body—and let me do what I wanted with him. But his young male libertine body was empty—it understood nothing lyrical or mystical about love. His attitude was conventional even hypocritical—Love was simply an empty random natural thing like a bowel movement. There was no need for any deeper knowledge or understanding than that—he’d stretch and yawn and go to sleep…

That’s when the Snarky Fissure—between my dying Romantic gambit and emerging Modernist doubts began to fragment and break. To think or write otherwise—would be totally throwback. I wasn’t in the mood for Miss Ginsberg—all that “I’ve seen the best of my generation” etc. etc. I was interested in only one person—Claude Bordreaux…

Like Rimbaud said—one night I got down on my knees in front of Beauty. But I got disillusioned—and alienated. Not out loud of course—it wasn’t like Cain doing in Able. But I had the mark of Cain on lips—my lips wanted to be Claude’s lips. I wanted to tremble like Claude—I wanted to be Claude.

Didn’t I have everything I needed—my Adonis-built young stud gymnast? His exquisite View Carré Venus torso—his biceps strong and as helpless as Michelangelo’s “Slave.” He possessed every talent—and yet there was nothing there. It was truly a dilemma I had to face—my bridegroom’s mercurial presence. But his male beauty was all surface—there was no depth to it…

Later for better or worse—I’m looking back at my marriage with LangPo poetics. All surface—no depth. No real narrative—no closure at the end. No plot—other than the Now. It’s funny how 2 years can go by so fast—without any beginning, middle or end…

My Big Easy boyfriend—was my infernal interlocutor. It was my gay soliloquy—that turned me into “the saddest of your servant girls.” A “slave” on my knees—a poet “burdened with the scorn of the most contemptible hearts.” He laugh at me and shrug—“You’re so fucked up, man” he’d say.

My various and sundry transgressive disillusionments—I had a List a mile long. Like Bordreaux’s “delicate feelings” and his “mysterious” urges—they weren’t delicate or mysterious at all. They were operating with a logic completely alien to mine—the logic of a libertine young male who’d later get married and have kids. There was no PoMo concealment or lyric mystery—no ruse to woo or lure me into Otherness.

There was no obscurity—only promiscuity. My stupid naïve attempts to understand Bordreaux—to fathom male beauty and the mystery of Maleness when no such thing existed. I’d mistaken my own shallow hollow existence—as a need to interpenetrate him in search of my own depth. I was the one without depth—he didn’t need depth to live like me. Depth was for the sea—he was Billy Budd the Foretopsman.

A typical tacky thing to do was curse him—to call Bordreaux a demon. “You’re a Demon! You’re a Demon, you know. You’re not Human!!!” Which only showed I was still caught up—in hopeless fag lyricism. His reaction to my passion demonic—was simply “Love needs to be reinvented.” He’d say this in bed sometimes—with his arms behind his head. With his eyes closed—and a big grin on his face. He’d flex his biceps—and then his nipples. He’d let his Body do the talking—Body Language was where it was at...

Later in the library I read Rimbaud: “When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man—heretofore abominable—having given her release, she too will be a poet!” In all my seeming abhorance for myself and my supposedly abominable faggy position—I suddenly realized Bordreaux was right. I needed to reinvent myself—accommodate my ambivalence. I needed a new lyricism—a more realistic one with a snarky slant.

To help me along this path of delirium and enlightment—Bordreaux snarked me. He niggled me and spent hours making me feel ashamed of myself and everything I did. The “shock” (s’indigne) I felt was bathetic and absurd—yet its hellish warmth was better than Bourdreaux’s icy-cool looks.

By far the worst pain—was Bordreaux’s lack of love or hate. It baffled and flummoxed me—how cold-blooded he was. And yet that very same calm relaxed cold-bloodedness—was the sullen muy macho maleness I craved. Even when he lost it completely—it was like he was holding something back. What was it?—or was I just imagining it? Was it just the pure unadulterated young male athletic libertine body? Or was there something else—beneath that emotionless butchy facade?

As for Bordreaux’s silence at the end—the only utterance was my own silent lyric voice in drag. I was truly a foolish virgin bride each time he lost it—the syntax of his Body Language shut down completely. As he became his body—and his body became him. He said nothing—his body said everything. Was there some kind of inner communion between himself—and what couldn’t be said? His libertine voice so silent—was he just too shy to let me hear how he really felt?

Afterward his sophomore year, he started dating girls. That’s when the silence lifted—and I paid the ultimate price. I came to the sobering realization—that he was not only dating behind my back but letting it all hang out better with them than me.

The giveaway was easy—he’d lost his shy insistence to keep it to himself. His deeply rooted narcissism—a Venice where floods of onanism took hold. He was sharing his selfish self-indulgence—with some lucky girlfriend naturally. He was straight after all—that’s what attracted me to him. It was mind-boggling to me to imagine—I saw these images of canals of gushing semen, a whole city’s worth, flooding a pussy instead of me…

It was suddenly like Death in Venice—my love for Bordreaux had been real even tho troubling. But now I felt like Ashenbach—a classic victim of foolish unrequited love.
I realized the endgame was approaching—each time we made love, I heard her voice coming thru him. But it was only the first of many girlfriends—odd how each climax matched the way his girlfriend called out at the end?

By the end of my “Gay Solilquy”—the lyric poem had become me. All of Bordreaux’s dramatic narcissism—had become mine. I was still his Slave—but somehow my continuing dependence on him had lost its homoerotic tone. My naïve lyric position now had a new artifice to it—my lyric body and libertine voice were now one.

I could tell endless Sadean stories now—about how socially-negated my life was. Like Justine’s ever renewed storytelling—about how she’d always ended up the orifice of the party. But I’m beyond that decoy and victimizing ideology now. I’ve created a lyrically complex self—thanks to Bordreaux and Snarkology.

I’m beyond Verlaine’s sad virginity and Aschenbach’s Venice rouge & beachchair. I’m more Rimbaud-esque now—my lyrical stance is “for and by” myself now. It’s sardonic and dark like onyx—it’s love with a snarky edge.

1 comment:

So snark me!