With an old polyester orchid from Woolworth’s, I take my
pirate hat, neatly styled with feathers and braid trim –
“Pirate” is the fancy-dress shop genre, though it’s only
a fibrous pasteboard “not to be worn in rain”– and I’m off
to impersonate myself tonight at the masquerade.
Not as anything other than how it is the muses
like to dress me up: the muse of history, bespectacled,
peering at manuscripts; the smart muse of the dance
in a dinner suit; and the roué comic muse preparing
to go deadpan for a juicy story of misconduct.
I’ve been getting older lately and now, step by
creaking step (to use a creaking rhetorical figure
I never use), time to get ready to get disgusting
in public and enjoy it, the way I once could have
let myself become some kind of gay bar mascot,
because the maturer queer finds his own vanity
parading in front of an audience, and while men
fucking each other with abandon is to some only a fearful
fantasy, others know it as the old wine they’ve long
tasted the last of, having escaped the massacre,
and for yet others it’s the drug they’re still in thrall to:
I don’t mind which they are – I show them the dirty old
man that I am, as I pretend I’m some rear admiral
knowing the ways of the fleet, and relate a tale of
seventeenth-century sodomy in a rhymingly musical
presentation of anal intercourse up against the law,
here in an indoor pleasure garden set up with trees
and a classical gazebo, where I ponce about while
women, at the mention of buggery, fondle their
boyfriends’ buttocks, tightly rounded and masculine.