Michael and Eric

Now that we have worked Love out of our System.

Now that I have scalded my bum washing off the grease.

Now that I have dressed in jeans, undressed, and dressed again, more satisfied with my drab, easy access camouflage pants.

Now that you’ve given up lying in bed, trying to sleep, and joined me on the couch, where I lazily muse about ingenious ways to murder you for sleeping around, for stealing my socks, for having a small goatee like Christ, and long dirty blond hair that might be twisted into an excellent noose.

Now that I’ve smoked my last cigarette.

Now that I have tossed the remote aside, leaned over and kissed your naked knee and said, “The weather is nice. Let’s get the Hell out of here.”

Now that we’ve crossed Broadway, Amsterdam, and Columbus, unmindful of the signals or the volume of traffic heading toward the River,

We find that it is raining nothing but sunshine in Central Park, and has been, since lunch.

We find that Nobody is waving who isn’t a blade of grass, and Nobody is drowning who isn’t some kind of bottom-feeding carp.

We hear a twig snap like a celery stalk fresh from the crisper.

I notice that you have finished your joint and have tucked the remains into an Altoid tin, and found a low out cropping of granite in Manhattan on which to perch and survey the glories of Creation.

This is where I sneak up behind you and ping you with a piece of Reality that I pocketed on the Bridle Path, unbeknownst to you.

This is where squirrels with nuts in their hands look up in astonishment at the rocks as a war of pebbles erupts between two boys and Nobody gets seriously hurt.

Speedos and Space Suits

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: I am here talking with author Eric Norris about his new book of short stories, poems and essays, Cock Sucking (On Mars). Eric, about that title. Cock sucking I can understand. But why choose Mars for sucking cock when you live so close to Manhattan?

ERIC: I have already sucked off everyone worth sucking off in Manhattan, I guess. And the G-Train is terrible, especially on weekends. It is easier to get to Mars than Brooklyn from where I live. In Queens. It’s time to move to another planet. Besides, I have a thing for guys in uniform—lifeguards and astronauts, mostly. I was going to call the book Speedos and Space Suits.

NYTBR: Is that all you do, think about swimming and space sex?

ERIC: No, not really. But, I must admit, I do enjoy that unbearable lightness of being. Just floating. I do have a great deal of fun with the idea of other people thinking about sex, though. The book is really an inquiry into how we do that: how we establish our identities in the minds of others. I start with a poetic device, a supposed poltergeist, the ghost of my childhood, and I move gradually forward in time, from various perspectives, until I pass my death. I use the mouth of the poet as a metaphor.

NYTBR: Like Auden says, “Poetry survives…a way of happening, a mouth.”

ERIC: Exactly. Most of the cock sucking actually occurs behind the scenes in the book, in the reader’s imagination—the only organ of pleasure an author really has access to.

NYTBR: [Tapping his forehead, remembering something.] Wordsworth. Didn’t he say something about the connection between pleasure and poetry in his ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads?’ What was that line…

ERIC: I think it was more than a single line, if I know Wordsworth.

NYTBR: Let me Google it. [Tapping furiously at his iPad.] Here it is:


“Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man.”

--William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1802


ERIC: See, cock sucking. Sensitivity. A love for Man. For Art. Wordsworth is not my favorite poet, but he was certainly a major cocksucker, in my opinion. Many gay scholars believe that Dorothy, Mrs. Wordsworth, was really a guy in a gingham dress—probably Coleridge, his collaborator.

NYTBR: [Incredulous] Really?

ERIC: No. That was just a joke told by Lord Byron in one of the lost cantos of Don Juan. Still, it is kind of touching to think of Wordsworth and Coleridge holding hands.

NYTBR: You old Romantic. What you are saying is kind of disgusting, if you asked me. Wordsworth and Coleridge. [Makes a sour cherry face.] I would much rather see Keats and Shelley going at it.

ERIC: [Patiently, as if addressing a child.] Poetic tastes might have changed since Wordsworth’s day, but cock sucking hasn’t. We just use different labels to describe our lollipops in the twenty-first century. I use the concept of cock sucking for the sake of convenience, as a kind of lyrical shorthand, because I am gay. People would be very put out if I didn’t do something queer in public: blow kisses, blow jocks, dress up, go down, dance, toss beads, or something. To cut through all of the bullshit, I was thinking of calling my book Butt Fucking (On Mars). But I felt that critics would not take the analogy—pardon the pun—seriously. Cock Sucking (On Mars) is very hard work. Mars is a cold and arid world awaiting transformation. Mars is the future. Mars is poetry.

NYTBR: What is butt fucking then?

ERIC: Butt fucking is earthier. It is different. Anal sex is more like prose. All you need to do is throw on a cowboy hat and yell, “YEEEHAW!” like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. I like a little of both. Prose and poetry. Poetry and prose. Back and forth. Earth and Mars. Interplanetary commerce. Yaweh and “YEEEHAW!”

NYTBR: And comedy. And tragedy. The story of your home. The tale of Takaaki. In many ways, this is also a very sad book.

ERIC: Sad? It isn’t sad. Life isn’t sad. Life is beautiful: whatever form it takes, wherever we find it.

NYTBR: Maybe sad is the wrong word. Poignant. We see so many horizons here. And so many cages.

ERIC: Maybe I should have named the book Speedos and Space Suits, after all. Remember, every horizon is a kind of cage. Even the infinite depths of outer space. We can go nowhere unless we carry a little air with us. On our backs, or in our lungs. As poets, I think that we need to feel more comfortable living with vast horizons. And coping with cages. They are the same thing, really. We need to be able to live in both environments. In a sense, we need them both to survive.

NYTBR: How do you see yourself? In a Space Suit or a Speedo?

ERIC: [Laughing.] Do I really have to choose? Well, I am 44. To be honest, I think that I look better in a Space Suit these days. Still, it is hard to isolate one aspect of myself from any other, everything is connected: what I was once, what I am now. I am different things to different people at different times. Even to myself. When I look in the mirror, all that I see is a jumble of genetic material calling itself “Eric Norris.”

NYTBR: Sort of like me.

ERIC: Not exactly. You are a poetic device. My poltergeist. You are my Ariel. You are free to be anything you wish. You will never live. You will never die. You walk in eternity. Not like me.

Bleecker Street

Bleecker couldn’t be a bleaker street today:
rainy, raw, cold and empty, sidewalks
splattered everywhere with pale blotches of gum
past the age of bubble-blowing, spat out
in moments of distraction or disgust.

This bubblegum graveyard must be our street.
This is where you steer us anyway, this recessed
doorway two doors in. A funny place
to taste a square of Listerine, I think.
But who am I to argue with your tongue?

Satan's Beard

The evil thing about your face
must be that beard tickling my ear,

mouthing indecencies. Must you
be such a brutal man, whisper

all of your fantasies to me?
Your lightest word contains a Hell:
a feather to my testicles—
grit inside an oyster shell;

each follicle’s a little fork
in my behind—if you’ll forgive
so obvious a metaphor
for love. What can I do? I live

in such a state of horrible
anxiety that you might shave,
I’ve stopped shaving myself and I 
have hidden all the razors—save

one: this one I keep hidden
inside my tongue. Now, how shall I
reward you for those little forks?
Shall I recite some poetry

or fuck your face ridiculous?

Exquisite Proximity

Nothing makes me happier than this
gentle pressure where our shoulders kiss
briefly, shifting our positions, when
our bums grow numb. We sit and listen
patiently to a poet droning on
about something I have forgotten
all but the general details of:
a topic vaguely connected with love
and its many disappointments.

Leonardo In The Marketplace

“Passing the places where birds were sold, he would pay the price asked for them, take them from their cages, and let them fly off into the air, giving them back their lost freedom.”
-Giorgio Vasari, 1550


He nicked the skin on purpose, to release
the light. Scented by the lemon that he held,
the little half-moons of his fingernails
glowed this morning. When he sniffed the rind,

the odor of a memory—a spoiled
uterus—left his nostrils: a young girl
he dissected, with difficulty, last night. She
died giving birth to twins, two boys. He was glad

they lived. He took the time to sketch her hands.
They were particularly delicate, lilac, even
rendered in red chalk. He wondered why
we must turn blue in death? He wasn’t sure. He tossed

his lemon in the air and caught a song
above the cartwheels and the coughs. “How much
for the goldfinch?” he asked. Bird and man,
both cocked their heads. The poor refugee named

his price. Leonardo paid. He had no wish
to haggle over prices. Wicked cages.
The pages of his notebooks were bad enough
imprisonment. He might tie wings to men,

but there the similarity of men
to birds ended. He could set finches free.

Ghost Limb

It seems ridiculous, but I can feel
phantom fingers tickling my thigh.
That sensation on my skin’s so real,
I reach out for your hand. Don’t ask me why

I reach for you. I am a lunatic
for dwelling on your presence in this way—
way past the time of your departure. It
must be nerves playing tricks. Nerves love to play.

Everything suggests you’re here right now.
Everything beyond my leg is numb,
calm, relaxed, like after laughter. How
infectious some good memories become:

golden, green, then gangrenous. I’m sure
I should have cut your arm off.

I am sure.

Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale Of Two Poets

This book began as a comment on Facebook--an off-hand remark about how much I owed to the work of one man--multi-talented writer, editor, lyricist, chef, and porn star Gavin Geoffrey Dillard. That ethereal comment did not go unnoticed.

Apparently, both Gavin and God are always watching. Unlike God, Gavin had the affectionate grace to send a non-entity like me a note. So, I sent one back. He replied. And so on. This correspondence evolved into an exchange of poems--loving, longing, erotic, spiritual, philosophical, funny and sad--that has been edited and introduced by poet Michael Lassell and published by Sibling Rivalry Press as Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale Of Two Poets.

For two months, Gavin and I wrote a poem to each other each day. At the end of those 60 days, Gavin flew from Maui and I from New York City, and we met in the Holy City of San Francisco--our lavender Byzantium--for a meeting of mouths and minds that culminated in a naked poetry reading before an audience of media scholars at the National Communications Association's annual conference last year.

Stylistically, the book is framed as a series of epistles from a young and inexperienced apprentice of verse (myself) to an older and wiser and infinitely patient teacher (Gavin). In it, we assume different identities: Shiva, John Keats, a vase, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Emily Dickinson, Ulysses, an ancient stuffed duck, old goats, Hobbits, Wizards, Diane Arbus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emperor Hadrian, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and many others. But we never lose sight of each other. We give voice to men and women, gay and straight, fictitious and real, their desires and disappointments, tracing the lineage of love back to the beginning of all things.

If our effort stands for anything, I hope it will be regarded by the reader as a leap of faith: a plunge into the uncertainties of the future. Because, even in that lonely abyss, against the odds and your own expectations, like us, you may be surprised to wake in the arms of another--equally aroused--equally astonished--as yourself.

Click here to read publisher Bryan Borland's introduction and to check out an excerpt.