BI

I understand today is "Bi Visibility Day" so here's an early declaration of my so-called "bi-sexuality" (I always objected to the idea of only two kinds of sexual/sensual preference and experience, everyone I was ever with was unique and so was each sexual/sensual occurrences). It's the first lines of my 1974 ten-page autobiographical list poem "My Life" (which can be found in my last collection, Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017). [the formatting on this blog wouldn't let me break the lines without big gaps between them]

"I ate everything they put in front of me/read everything they put before my eyes/shook my ass, cried over movie musicals/was a sissy and a thug, a punk and an/intellectual, a cocksucker and a mother/fucker, helped create two new people,/paid taxes, voted and served four years/and a few weeks in the United States Air/Force, was court martialed and tried/civilly, in jail and in college, kicked/out of college, boy scouts, altar boys/and one of the two gangs I belonged to,/I was suspended from grammar and high/schools, arrested at eleven the year I/had my first "real sex" with a woman/and with a boy, I waited nineteen years/to try it again with a male and was sorry/I waited so long, I waited two weeks to/try it again with a woman and was sorry/I waited so long [...]"