Statue of Achilles’ Heel

Florin Giles is an English and Gender studies student with a special love for gay poetry and English boys. They love eyeshadow and are always late for class because they were busy backcombing their hair. Florin is a seventies and eighties enthusiast and still thinks David Bowie is the most perfect man to have walked the planet.

 

Torso of Dionysus From Gymnasium, Second Century, Unknown Sculptor

queens in public bathrooms sporting half-clad erections, yet again I am not welcome

a song to the golden piss streaked tiles, glory be to god.

 

A cultivated eyebrow, a plump and snarling lip; I see him

spilling lynxsweat and pubic hair on slickened sheets; spilling onto the pavement

a diaphanous and sickly bearded glow.

I am occupied by boys;

The dark downy hair of the arms and the eyelashes and hands and the murky English breath. When the cologne rubs off on my shirt and I’m stuffing the cloth to my nose for days, searching for the smell;

I am gay for you Ginsberg, I would fellate you in the supermarket by the health food aisle near the cereals, for nights I read your poems and the man I was

vomited out of me; I ate your words and they gave me the runs.

 

Glory be to Dionysus,

who fucked up the sun in a gothic motel in 1974. Glory be to the ashy figure immobile

in the plush and velvet Fitzwilliam Museum, where pink and golden college boys take photos

and wank over the crystallised bulging marble swinging phallus and straining arms.

Glory be to you Ginsberg,

I kneel quivering over dusty brown sandals. I drink from the pools of sweat in your elbows.

Glory be to Achilles,

I am built in your protracted image, though

none of the boys I like want to fuck me.

a fag in bright colours, locking myself in the cubicle of the men’s room after lunch each day, pressing myself to the wall,

trembling, politicised, asking for it. Fag is a word I love to be called, an Achillean word

I am thirsty to carry it.

I am thirsty,

 

I can almost taste the back of his neck where the bristles run diagonal to the skin;

 

I can smell his lacquered-down hair, running

grabbing elbows and hands, touching

as we can’t with other men. Thirsty,

 

I will drink the sweat and blood of every holy boy whose oily skin I longed to sleep my crescentmoon nailbeds upon, my torso is wrung out and I’m crucified each time a stranger, cashier or taxi driver unties my fractured self. I love the pounding rhythm of the fists, which fuels my heart as the word faggot falls like soot from the lips and lands in a burning halo around my golden temples,

Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!

Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!

The world is faggot! The soul is faggot! The skin is faggot! The nose is faggot!

The tongue and cock and hand and asshole, faggot!