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Three Poems By Juan Pablo Duboué Chew Chewing their chewing gum Its minty juice Burns my face Especially when it reaches my eyes As soon as the school bus drops me off Like a bag of potatoes, old, blackened and cheap. I smile at their spitting and pushing In the playground While the teachers stare at me in obvious surprise Well their eyes do not seem to show any shock at all It is I, right? It is the usual routine A little bit of good ol’ Catholic discrimination What are you looking at, priest? See how they’re making a man out of me? I do not complain no more There is a point when the area being hit Becomes numb And I do not feel So I lay in the comfort of the grass Conjure up an image of Aurora And plunge into a sweet slumber That I wish would last A hundred years. Chewing their chewing gum Its minty juice Burns my face Especially when it reaches my eyes… To My Fairy Godmother: If a fairy godmother is what I need to make my dreams come true, to make me see that the man that stands before me is the man I once despised. And now I’m wedding him, an alliance of demise. If a fairy godmother I had had she would have surely warned me beforehand that the man who keeps it quiet, never boasts, is the man who, in the bedroom, makes one rot. If a fairy godmother would have come to my rescue, a gentleman in disgrace. She would have taken the bull by its horns and domesticated it to a point of no return. For I resemble a woman or so they say: In how I feel and how I sense, In how I move and how I speak, In the career that I’ve chosen to pursue… In the role that I’ve been begged, over and over, to play. In the prevalence of right hemisphere over left and other psychological shenanigans I dare not say; I do not feel Woman. My ‘gender’ tells me woman I am not. And so does my psyche, and so does my heart, and so do my hairy armpits, and my penis. Why can’t I be a simple, plain, old school intuitive man with a sixth sense and a well developed taste? If only my fairy godmother would have listened to my parents’ prayers. And straightened me up Heterosexualize the hell out of me – Contempt? The Summer of our Love In the summer of our love the heat has become too unbearable, the poppies are drying the pond is evaporating the thrushes no longer migrate they stare at each other, melting melting away like rocks into diamonds and back into rocks Gargoyles of thrushes in the still oaks in the summer of our love. In the summer of our love the heat has consumed our foundations suffocating what used to be gasps of pleasure and moans of desire the fairies are burning the gnomes are unruly the elves are shrinking into ageing dwarves a resemblance of your ego and my self- esteem issues in the summer of our love. In the summer of our love the heat has flooded my cheeks not the healthy blushing of two lovers intertwined but the blazing flames of a fire in disguise the poppies are drying the pond is evaporating the thrushes no longer migrate they stare at each other, melting melting away like rocks into diamonds and back into rocks Gargoyles of thrushes in the still oaks in the summer of our love. |
