Swell Zine: Poetry

I am a flower vase,
empty.
My opening is so narrow,
every time they put stems down,
I gag them back. It's rude, I know.
Painted with roses, I should be so sweet,
but my neck is tight,
and I'm empty, empty, empty.

James Dean

Your father, no artist, rejected your dreams
in macho unease;
your mother adored you, started your theater,
but died in your boyhood.

Now you play young rebels in film,
Cal Trask, Jim Stark,
your thwarted need for your parents acting revenge.

Your looks are tense, your lips ruddy-full,
as you ask a reluctant father for love,
one man to another.

Farm-boy beauty,
you talk in the voice of a cool angry slouch,
blue Amerindian Anglo eyes enticing.

Naked pre-Lib you climb a tree high,
cock long and hard as it points to the sky.

Nude in an open apartment doorway
your slim boyish body stirs with juice
as you're fucked in your Stetson;
you pull on your prick and sperm the hall
as fast as your car crash death.

Exile

Clenched in a skull-grin of dust and grit,
I strike rocks for water with petrified branches,
trudge barren earth baked blind in the sun.
Aching uphill in stoic sureness
there is no change on the other side,
I dream of clouds in a dark-blue sky,
grassy ridges trickling dew,
streams at play among mossy trees
and purple tubular flowers.

Barry Frauman is the author of numerous short poems as well as several extended verse narratives. His work has appeared in the NewTown Writers' Off the Rocks as well as in the 2004 Gay Pride issue of the Windy City Times. His poem "Best Man" won Honorable Mention in the 2003 Ontario Poetry Society sonnet contest. Currently, he is working on Lionheart, a verse narrative inspired by the life, loves, and lusts of King Richard I of England. Barry is the director of the NewTown Writers' Literary Workshop.