Excerpt From ‘Post-Modern Blues’

OFM interviewed David M. Perkins in April 2020, just before his poetry collection, I May or May Not Love You, was released. COVID-19 arrived alongside that book just as bookstores were closing their doors, and locked out of any further interviews or readings, he went back to his desk and spent the ensuing months there. The world filled otherwise with pandemic distractions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other societal turmoil, and Perkins crafted his second collection, Post-Modern Blues. He agreed to share and talk about some of those new poems here.

Perkins:

The poem “Ode to the Back Door III” is a tribute to the time Denver’s gay community was beginning to come out of its closet on the heels of the Sexual Revolution. The backroom of the Back Door bar was a drag bar near the Capitol Building and you got to it by walking down one alley into another, and a single spotlight marked the sign over the door. A revelation to those of us just coming out at the time, and a safe and comfortable place just to learn to be yourself. The “statuesque one” in the poem, was “Christi Layne,” Christopher Sloan, who entertained in the evening, and fought passionately for gay rights all the time. Christi was instrumental in securing the parade rights for the first ever Gay Pride Parade in Denver, I later learned, among winning so many other gay rights issues in the day, and she taught us to love ourselves.

Ode to the Back Door III

(for DR)

Who are all these ladies painted up for entertainment?
Those are their words if not their voices: Streisand and
Liza, Diana Ross and Peggy Lee, so lovely—so very like
them, they are; gestures and tics, hair and lips, elegant

as hell in their counterfeit gowns up against aluminum
walls, shining in pink spotlights, gathering dollar tips,
plucked by fingertips there at the nip of evening gloves
matching or different from their dress or glittering high

stilettos, sweeping across that makeshift stage, grand.
What have I wandered in on? I thought (although this
visit had been long planned on) as I stood as far away
from them as I could in the otherwise darkened room,

drink in hand. Can all these glamorous doppelgängers
really be men, there is too much perfection performing
here to be anything like fake— but then that evening at
last-call done, when that statuesque one took the mic,

and in her bass voice above the applause looked us all
over, up and down, laughed and bowed, curtsied and
said, Remember! It doesn’t matter who you love, or how,
it only matters that you love, and we left hand in hand.

Perkins:

The poem, “There Aren’t Any” arose out of the horror of the George Floyd murder, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and caused me, like many other whiter-than-white people, to think about how we connect to each other, how we must learn how to connect with each other, and the underlying theme to Post-Modern Blues is a quote I use as an epigraph from the novelist E.M. Forster, “Only Connect!” If we’re going to survive as a nation—and as a species for that matter—we must realize that we are all in this short journey through life together.

There Aren’t Any

Of course I cannot comprehend being Black,
pale as paper as I am, pristine with privilege.
I wish it were not that we were strangers—I

know a bitter tincture of it: Faggot! flung at
me on the feared football field, full beer cans
flung at me on Philly streets, gone after with

baseball bats to bring back the anguish of it.
My fling with a Black drag queen never said
anything about color—and by that, I do not

imply some of my best friends are—it was an
entirely othered, universe else then and skin
seemed all a comparable texture in the tavern

and later in the dark. An anomaly? I battle it,
now I see the ills and abomination in all of it,
It is not oracular that we are racists. We are.

It comes with our customs and our citizenship,
it burbles in our blue blood—and we bought it.
I cannot assimilate it even as I am insufficient

to comprehend it. I could say some soupy thing
about sister- and brotherhood I suppose—some
pale word-balm about it. There aren’t any save
Love.

Perkins:

And then, as in the first book, I can never get away from the subject of love, and as Yeats called it, the “rag and bone shop of the heart.” What we have, what we have lost, what we may have missed with love—and “You Know Who You Are” probably doesn’t need too much explanation, because we’ve all been there, and, you know who you are.

You Know Who You Are

You are over there—in the life that could have been, or might have
been, or should have been, if the cards were dealt differently then.
Had you not left in the dark and slept instead until daybreak when
we awakened and had we gone out into morning together we might
have made it work.

Had I been better and had you forgiven, we may have made a lasting
set of tomorrows that led into a memorable album of long yesterdays
to remember. Instead of moving on into a new city alone, with weeks
that began to grow between, had you returned, had I been braver and
ignored my doubts.

You came for a light, Avez-vous du feu? in the Jardin des Tuileries (we
knew we were both scouting something new), had we then been more
bold and moved beyond our mutual blushes and tried what we could
to push our way through that language barrier by laughing together,
then, Ami, what?

So many doors more we did not dare go through, so many impressions
across many rooms, so many likelihoods we refused to pursue, you are
over there in your half-smile, your nod, that coy wink and subtle salute.
You are over there, you know who you are, you are forever in a raffle of
what could have been.

Reprinted by permission of ICE CUBE PRESS