TO BE, AND THEN TO BE MORE
Being Gay,
Being Gallant.
It is a metaphysical paradox,
To be revered and feared all at once,
You remind men of all they could have been,
Of all they could have seen,
You exude that.
The gorgeous gall,
Of embodying the freedoms they claim to fight for,
Yet fear would destroy them,
So they take aim.
Being Lesbian,
Is Living!
And laughing,
And learning;
How to build new worlds
and to be in Love,
I’ve heard it’s astounding!
The idea that women can exist as ends in themselves,
and not as means for men,
Well, that just might do them in – at last.
To be Lesbian is to be liberated,
and how dare you!
Being Trans,
Being Transcendant,
Always in surplus,
And to surpass the tedium of human anatomy,
It is to push the evolution of experience and even existence,
It is to transform yourself into something we often need telescopes to observe,
A nebula – a birthing of the firmament;
The Milky way where celestials ascend through their rites of passage.
To be Trans is to transfigure the universe into an unbounded Truth,
And yet in danger, of a small world built on faulty figments.
Being Bi,
Like Biology,
You bind us.
While we cling to the images of ourselves,
Those busts of new gods who hear only an echo of a prayer:
‘Dear god, let me be loved’
You reply, ‘but I love you, as you all are’
Bisect the vanities!
Bomb the boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’,
For our Beauty is bearable only when seen from both sides,
So you are berated by all sides.
Being Queer,
It feeds a curiosity,
Why are we are we so obsessed with permanence?
That we’ve named rivers long after they’ve passed?
That we keep our names way beyond our births?
Until men become menacing,
Imprisoned by a moment in time.
How can the laws of motion be Newtonian,
When You are motion itself?
How can fluidity be so fabulous,
When in their hardened eyes, it is feeble?
To be loathed for loving,
To be grated for your greatness
To be beat for your boundlessness
To be a conquest for their Questions
Oh, but to Be in a world that is still becoming.
S.T. Bane
