.

To take a walk each day is good of course,
But not in June, beware, for this I know:
The youngsters march in rallies loud and hoarse,
You might be asked to join their pretty show.

If you refuse there is no easy way
To prove your faith in humanism’s creed.
One cannot wear a normal shirt that day,
Though ripped and tiny shorts will do indeed.

With vacillation once you take their side,
If you are male, a boy might pounce on you,
And pucker tofu-smelling lips with pride
In hopes to make you swoon amidst their crew.

False martyrs who will threaten with a hex,
They risk their lives for sacred public sex.

.

.

Sarban Bhattacharya is a 22-year-old poet and classicist currently pursuing a master’s degree in English literature.

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9 Responses

  2. Julian D. Woodruff

    On male hs sexual aggression I’m with you: it’s not ubiquitous but it is pretty common.

    Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    The scum who go marching in “ethnic pride” or “sexual identity” parades are a long-standing problem in many cities. These gatherings, if not carefully policed, tend to turn into civic disturbances and quasi-riots. And since our police forces are largely defunded and execrated, these marches are essentially legalized trouble.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Sat an – Priggery is the most execrated form of snobbery today. It is permitted that we be horrified by the sight of a multiple pile-up, we can laugh our socks off at Fawlty Towers but in just one field we dare not be heard to express emotion, the natural reaction prompted by instinct, the reaction that is reflex, involuntary and difficult to mask, the natural aversion of the great majority to the practice of sodomy. No doubt the word itself will be proscribed shortly if it isn’t already, to be permanently replaced by pink and gay. If there is nothing wrong with the practice of sodomy why do we need to replace the word with anodyne substitutes? I notice in your header that it is now called Pride Month, not Gay Pride Month, yet another example of the blatant and disgusting, cynical and insidious manipulation of the language.

      Reply
      • Peter Hartley

        Sarban – sorry you had a diabolical name change at the hands of this laptop which I am thinking of immersing in a bucket of coypu phlegm.

      • Norma Okun

        Peter, I appreciate the way you talk about the “manipulation of language” It is what they do in the news. The press can make the cruelest thing that people can do to people into something good. It can make the criminally minded into a pussy cat. It can turn a vile politician who left a girl to drown and call him “The Lion of the Senate” it can make shame into pride, and pride into what it wants to represent. It is manipulation of words and it happens in every area of life. That is what sells the news!!

  5. Cynthia Erlandson

    Thank you, Sarban. What have we come to, that a deadly sin is so celebrated?

    Reply
  6. Damian Robin

    Thanks for the subtle poem, Sarban. The sticky niceness of acceptance hides the rainbow-painted baseball bat of ‘have to’.

    Not all ‘gays’ would sodomise or be sodomised. And I wouldn’t think it’s used a lot among everyday homosexuals, academics may do. And it does not apply as much to lesbians.

    But the words ‘gay’, ‘queer’, ‘bent’, ‘fairy’, ‘dyke’, . . . are graphittied with homosexual daubing.

    And the rainbow as a symbol is almost taken over by sexually acting out barbarians. We are lucky that with the CCP/Wuhan Virus pandemic, in the UK. The rainbow is being attached as a badge of praise and thanks to the work of the National Health Service (NHS). Adults and children are encouraged to do knitting, crochet, collages, crayon pictures, and other craft works, and put it in windows, on walls and doors, and books.

    The homosexual use of ‘queen’ is a clever step from ‘queer’, a little pull down of ‘r’ to ‘n’. It references inane parodies of femininity. We’re lucky to have Elizabeth II, an active, female monarch in the UK , with her wider echoes of history through colonies and empire. Her longevity has been a dam for the overspill of the word ‘queen’ to relate solely to homosexual males.

    In your poem, Sarban, it is the sense of being sucked in that’s abhorrent and recognisable to me. And I use ‘sucked’ deliberately though in sexual contexts it would go with ‘off’ rather than ‘in’. We’re lucky that ‘to suck’ has a perjorative side or the word could be sucked further into the increasing lexicon of homosexual banter.

    I think we can regain the old meanings of ‘gay’ etcetera through bringing forward their old nuances in future poetry. Poetry is a sounding board for wider rhetoric after all.

    Just my present thoughts.

    Reply

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