I Macbeth myself around the house, playing gay, putting on my pretty slippers and fuzzing up the floor. I’m a pom pom, I flit, I act exasperated when someone says something intelligent. What’s that, first in the yard, the pugs I adore, the little wuvly pugs I call names in babytalk and shush with my herringbone lips. This winter I knew it’d be cold so I wrapped myself in ermines and royal purples to keep in the blood heat. For you and for the moon so you could feel comforted, both reflecting your light off my sateens. Toys in an attic, I tell the nature poet, to see what she’ll write with it. Then I tell her let’s play make-up housewives together. Missoula housewives take their blond hair on a walk. Honey gums my fuzzy slippers and I am marooned. Honey, I call, please remove me from this poem. It’s sticky and getting deeper. And if I stay so sweet a dog will chase me! I wish the woman poet were my man. I wish I could entertain myself so swiftly as the dogs chase me, my little pugsy wugsies and I stomp the honey off. I am a strong lacuna, I tell myself. I tell myself I am my own lacuna. And that if something’s not right it mustn’t be attributed to my lack of attention to detail. I flit, I shop, I am gay in my tights and boots I found on sale but bought them full price anyway, for the story of it. A certain figure transposes itself inside my brain. It starts as a full pot of rice, is licked, and becomes magic. A magic Bridget Riley I want to take into my orifice and kill for her adorability is unacceptable here. There is only one speaker, there is only one eye, this poem is for Lucie Brock-Broido as I respect her hunger but not her methods. I am eyeing her niche in the futureworld and telling my slippers to seek it. Run, feet, run. The birds this morning remind me of my nature poet, I’ll name her Bridget Riley and I am bipolar about her. I am running myself into the bridge I dreamed about and have been writing poems about since I began writing this morning, fuzzy slippers ajamble near the gut of my hips, I bon bon myself into American society an American blue holiday wherein gay men in their late adolescences and early adulthoods drink themselves to death. Unless they’ve killed themselves with shotguns or found themselves pinned to an IV drug and HIV positive, bareback and with no elders to look to. Tell me it isn’t so, my slippers whimper, I whisper back, it’s true. This is a Fort Hood that’s been going on too long, too slowly, too many gay men dead. No sociologist will touch me. Two novels I’d like to write involve the serial self-destruction of gay men. It’s not limited to us, I tell my slippers, it could be anyone denied. Nature longs after a voice, expresses itself in trees and when we begin to kill one another we defer nature, tell it it's almost time for peace. What about the dead. What about our grief. And the names of those who have killed themselves show up in the newspaper as heart attacks or unspecified. The family is ashamed. And may not suspect their loved one was gay. In the afterlife they criticize us for not stomping out of our slippers and caring. What is no longer demanded hurts all of us. The criticism the breeze picks off is not loud enough. Gay love poems were never enough. The gay couples I look up to are not monogamous. They are the only ones I see together. Montana is rife with heterosexism. I can’t hold my boyfriend’s hand in the street so I don’t have a boyfriend. My sick slippers are off my feet and heading to bed. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to give up and stop. This is where my dead friends are remembered and I don’t tell anyone that I feel sad. This is my shame at the grief I feel for my dead. The dead men I don’t know who died of AIDS. All they got was this stupid quilt. Fuck off, I tell myself, but maybe I need to hear it. In that movie where all the gay men die of AIDS. Oh, we’ve never heard of it. Filmmaker, make it. In that song where all the gay men die of AIDS. We’re still being born. Stillborn into a society that doesn’t recognize our pain. Untitled performance artist, would you stand up in mixed company and tell a message. Will you couch it in rhetoric so people don’t trust it. A tree in the backyard echoes my grief. I have never been able to express it. I couldn’t cry for days. It’s physically exhausting. This poem is a distinction I’m making to myself for my own laziness. I’m lacking the resources to do anything but write this poem and be angry. I want to be angry at you for agreeing with me. What does it mean if you agree with me. What will any of us do. I can’t bring back my dead. I can hardly remember.