The Food of Love

I could never sing. In the grade-school operetta
I sat dark offstage and clattered coconut shells.
I was the cavalry coming, unmusical, lonely.

For five years I played the piano and metronome.
I read Deerslayer in small print while I waited for my lesson,
and threw up after the recital at the Leopold Hotel.

I went to a liberal college, but I never learned
how to sit on the floor or help the sweet folk song forward.
My partridge had lice, and its pear-tree had cut-worm blight.

Yes, this song is for you. In your childhood a clear falsetto,
now you sing along in the bars, naming old songs for me.
Even drunk. you chirrup; birds branch in your every voice.

It's for you, what I never sing. So i hope if ever
you reach, in the night, for a music that is not there
because you need food, or philosophy, or bail,

you'll remember to hear the noise that a man might make
if he were an amateur, clattering coconut shells,
if he were the cavalry, tone-deaf but on its way.

(Poema de William Dickey, em "Love Speaks its name - gay and lesbian love poems, p. 155)