in, and, out.

(malakos) i am Queer. and Queer am i. thus am i outside the normal, out on the margins, out of the closet, and kicked out of the patriarchy. i am out of your sight and out of your mind: i am out of my mind but still well with-in sight of my-self. my voice: it is Marginal

i am a lavender menace: my color it is since i am (in)between girl/pink and boy/blue. a drunken Alkibiades brought crowns of lavender-violets and ivy for his men lovers (Agathon and Socrates) during one of athens' more (in)famous dinner parties. Sappho of Lesbos wrote poems about lavender headbands in the hair of the women she loved. seneca the elder called the people of my Tribe the twilight of the genders - for we are halfway (in)to night and halfway (in)to day and yet never quite fully either one. my body: it is Liminal

As deviant Queer i am outside. as lavender limen, i am inbetween. out and in. both at once.

i focus on this locus: the landscape of my body. i read my skin and try to speak those (in)scriptions from Out of the Silence during a few liquid moments of desire. I can also chant at times using the marrow from my tibia or i can drum out a song with my skull (the choreographies and poems though come from my guts and blood)

i share with you a secret:

(theos) the post-cruci-fiction and post-res-erection jesus did not really tell his beloved(!) john that he was alpha and omega. of course not. because jesus spoke aramaic (and probably some greek), so what he really told his beloved john was "ani alef veh tav", or "i am alef and tav". in aramaic, the names of letters also mean things: the first letter in the aramaic alphabet, alef, means ox and the last letter, tav, means cross. (in our modern roman alphabet, if you tip the letter "A" upside down, the way it used to be, you can see the ox head with two horns - and the letter "t" is still a cross.) so jesus told john that he was an ox and a cross. the reference to the cross is obvious. but what of the ox? an ox is a castrated bull and bulls are often sacred to the goddess, but a castrated bull is especially sacred to one particular goddess:

(thea) artemis of ephesos. in ephesos, Her temple contained a large statue of Her - and Her Amazon priestesses worshipped Her in furiously ecstatic dancing and eunuch (Tranny-Faggot?) priests worshipped her by castrating themselves and later, as proxies for themselves, they castrated bulls and hung their balls on the statue representing Her-self. others then made copies of the huge Artemis of the ephesians with bulls' balls hanging on Her and now all that is left are the copies, depicting the testicles hanging off Her shoulders. but for centuries, the secret of the testicles was lost. anthropologists and archaeologists and art historians thought that the little nodules hanging from her chest were rows of breasts (but no one knew why they didn't have nipples). but now we know about the balls and thus she is not the many-breasted artemis but the betesticled artemis. now there's a woman with balls! sorry mr freud but SHE had no penis envy (or maybe this, Her ultimate act of penis envy has expiated, atoned for Woman past-present-future?)

and aretemis of ephesos was being worshipped at the very moment that jesus of nazereth was dripping menstrual blood from the slit in his side on the roman cross because he had sodomized john the beloved (thanks go to M.H. for warning me over buttermilk pancakes at "the other place" that jesus christ was a menstruating male). when the romans gashed his side and lots of blood came out of that slit, there was no tampon for jesus at that moment with which to plug up his new cunt. he had to wait a while before mary (the whore mary, not the madonna mary) could bind him up with a cloth and lay him in the tomb/womb for his rebirth. the metaphysical Eunuch/ox/castrated-bull had lost his balls to artemis. in and out was jesus. in and out was artemis.

(phallos) now they say that that one male god (elohim, jehovah, jesus, allah, et alia) is omni-potent and omni-scient and omni-present. i think that potency, science, presence are all virile virtues (both from the latin word "vir" - man) which have been projected/reflected/refracted into/onto god by virile man, at the expense of woman. if that male god is omni-potent is woman omn-impotent? if that male god is omni-scient, is woman "omn-ignorant"? if he's omni-present, is she "omni-absent"? more on presence/absence: men have said that because a woman's cunt is (in) that she is categorically absent (like aretmis before she got some balls from jesus) and that because a man's cock is (out) that he is authentically present (like jesus before he gave up his balls to artemis).

but when i was fourteen, i hated my nasty private parts and i didn't want them any longer: to me they were superfluous/superfluidous and didn't make me feel present at all, but excessive...like i had TOO MUCH. so i desired to cut off that dangly little thing down there (god, it WAS too much). i sat in my mother's bathroom (mr freud would love that) with a giant pair of shears (actually they were only small scissors, but in the distorted convexity of perseus' polished shield, they looked much larger than Life) and I was hoping to get up the nerve to cut it all off - to follow in jesus' footsteps. but i didn't because i was fearful that i would bleed to death, and i didn't want to die like jesus - i just wanted those damn things (my portable Trinity of testicle, testicle, shaft) to...leave me alone! and quit bothering me! that is what i cried so many times glaring down at my presence/selves. if i can't be IN at least i can be OFF but i knew that i would bleed too much - much more than my mother does when she is reminded monthly that she is (in) and therefore out/absent. so i compromise and merely humiliate my selfs by cutting off all my pubic hair with those perseid shears. and i was almost murdered in gymn class by other boys whose pubic hairs and Trinities remained fully present. what WAS i thinking?

(thanatos) i remove my shoes and tread lightly upon the sandy soil just barely (out)side this tomb/cave, for i am in mourning: my Queer brothers die and i cannot stop them. this virus (not from the latin word for man but from wirus: poison, slime) cums (in) to them and i cannot stop it. and i have no words to speak my anger and sorrow at this loss. so many beautiful Faeries lie wilting, gasping, there inside the tomb, the womb, the cave, and i dare not enter: once you go (in) you never come (out). the chasm (in)between us is far too great: the chasm seperating the haves and the have-nots. (Gay Black Male, HIV neg. seeks same). the chasm between the ins and the outs, the (en)raged and the (out)rageous.

(eros) i straddle him and he straddles me. i am (in) him and he is in me. i am out of the closet and he is out that we are in each other. When I make love with another man, I dwell upon the mystery of his sameness (rather than his otherness). When I touch the nape of his neck, I find "God" there. And then I ruminate on the similarities and symmetries of our beautiful bodies; on the tension of muscle and sinew; on the choreographies of our desire. I cry out from all my skin and hear my own voice echoing from the warmth of his body. And the vibrations of the echoes last for hours and days, filling me from my in to my out. I relish my concavity to his convexity and his concavity to my convexity. With the newest of tongues we begin to speak: that he and I are two whole and perfect subjects of desire - not subject and object, but subject and subject. From the edge of my skin, I follow the geographies and topographies of his body and I see and know that his body is my body is his body. Subtle differences contained within Sameness. Through the grace that is desire, I carefully trace my name upon his skin so that I can remember how to fable the ineffable; and to remind him until the very end that no longer is it that I love him or I desire him, but that I AM HIM. we love each other as we love our Selfs for we are both in and out at the same time.