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This isn’t a book about you, nôhkom. A book about you, a book in which you appear uncomplicatedly in a world of your own making, is an anti-nation undertaking. Canada is in the way of that book.
To speak of the possibility of losing me because I’m not near you might also point to the ways that we inhabit imperiled bodies in a shrinking world in which we don’t remember how to coexist without stymying collective flourishing.
What I can do is love as though it will rupture the singularity of Canadian cruelty (irrespective of whether this is a sociological possibility). Herein lies my poetic truth.
In the museum of political depression1, which is the world-at-large, I’m routinely mistaken for an item in an exhibition about the havoc of modernity,
To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.
the trauma of colonialism erupts in the minds and bodies of men, who then bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers.
What is it to live, to suffer, and, above all, to love in an emotionally inflexible world fashioned to produce men who eat “too much of the sunset?”4
Joy, then, is a politics of citation.
:?
At times, however, I strain to call up shared memories; I suspect this is because our senses of selfhood were intertwined, that we were bound up in a “you” and an “us” and a “we” that hardened into a singular entity over time,
a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct.
fungibility
This “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it” floats above our family like an open secret.
Everywhere NDN men are in a struggle against gender.
One time my dad said I was living the life that he could’ve had, had he refused to let anyone be the bearer of his optimism.
Like most parents, he inspects me through the rosy filter of unconditional love, but he doesn’t have enough material to develop a complex idea of the intricacies of Billy-Ray Belcourt the adult, who is different from Billy-Ray Belcourt the child.
oof
Despite establishing in clear yet sparse wording that their happiness was contingent on my happiness, there was also a fog of grief. This was the grief of childlessness. In my vocalization of a non-normative sexual identity, they heard too a disavowal of futurity, that I had relocated permanently to a land emptied of fathers, one inhospitable to the customs of fatherhood.
To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.
The noise of everyday life rings inside my head. This essay sits at the center of the multi-sensory labyrinth that is memory recall. When not distracted by other business, I, like a janitor, scan the darkened building of me for detritus and misplaced things, something to put me to work again. When nothing jolts me out of a stupor, I stare up at the ceiling, hoping something will drop onto my face, something with which to make a mess worth looking at, worth showing to others.
This repeated in the thick of one hot summer. It matters what I call this now, so I hesitate to call it anything.
Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.
In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.
Let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.
For years, I ate photo albums as late-night snacks.
Teens don’t read for beauty, but to practice the art of disappearance. Today, I read and write for beauty, and live so as to disappear.
I have found myself a number of times driving in the direction of the old apartment in which I spent many weekends with unlovable men out of neither nostalgia nor habit but a yearning for revenge. I believe it is a writer’s job to tend to memory in its last hours, as though a nurse in an infirmary. Lately, however, I want to hunt memory, to sink my teeth into it, to transform it into a gangly creature I might terrorize.
This displacement of volatile emotion wasn’t what I was after. I wanted to watch memory squirm. To torture it as it had me. I wanted it to lock eyes with me in a pale, trembling light.
If I’m a writer, it’s because to be an NDN is to be a concept that speaks.
motored by the possibility of my impending death, which is perhaps one of our species’ oldest aphrodisiacs; if not, surely this is the case for gay men.
In my bed, ass up, face buried into a pillow, he was a monument to shame and, because of this, godly.
Am I fucked up because I believe beauty is in short supply?
I’m in the middle of nowhere, which for some is all we have left and all there ever was.
Your staying put isn’t an innocent stance. Nothing will make this hurt less.
I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun?
There is, however, a key distinction: to be NDN is to be without a “sense of life” from the get-go. All of us are unlucky in that we make soggy memories in a weaponized loneliness that is irreversible.
Our fury is animalistic. Can a poem resemble animality? Can a poem be resonant with it? Fury is a revolutionary habit. I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else. In my fury, I’m differently gendered. I want to be a bad girl. I want to be a bad girl so there’s a musicality to my rebellion. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world. A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization. No one will look at me adoringly and because of this I
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I cry about other matters: that so much of being alive in the Americas is about playing dead.
Until then, I will try to be a pretty wound at least once.
Confession: I’m not yet comfortable taking my shirt off in a poem.
D is the first man I fall in love with. I write about him all the time, even when I’m not writing about him.
A few days later he tells me he loves me, a confession that throws me, for we have yet to sink into the mutual debt that comes from months of care-giving and re-subjectification.
I ask, How do you know you love me? He doesn’t answer. Later he gives me a cheap-and-dirty response from the bargain bin of capitalist feeling—I love you because you do so much for me.
“That our eyes stopped / believing in what was in front of us / was the closest we got to killing ourselves.”5
At the core of homonormativity is an erotics of whiteness, which designates some bodies as undesirable, too submerged in the dirty waters of signification to rescue.
Has anyone ever managed not to mold the body into an archive of their own degradation?
I hook up with men I don’t find attractive because I suspect they’ve been told they aren’t thin enough, toned enough, tall enough, pretty enough, or white enough to fuck. I take on a liberal savior complex. I commit to the idea that my body can be the conduit through which they learn to love their own.
Jill Stauffer gets at something like this with her concept of “ethical loneliness,” which for her is “the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities.”3
I believed the quirk that made novelists novelists was an ability to say no to the world. But as a poet, I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object. I said yes to the world again and again, sometimes to my detriment, if only to increase the volume of my selfhood, a performance of creativity I felt closer to than invention.
The summer I had hours-long anal sex while battling a bout of hemorrhoids was an object lesson in entropy.
Foucault is a Libra and this matters to me.
lol????
inchoate,
