A Primer for the Small Weird Loves

Fiction | Poem | Adult

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Objectified Body

A prominent motif is the male body degraded to the status of an object by another man. It manifests most conspicuously in Stanza 3, where a man turns his lover’s body into “a piece or real estate” (Line 27), “another fallow field” (Line 28), and “a table” (Line 30). These actions teach the objectified man “how to hate” (Line 26), probably both himself and his aggressive lover, who has “made a place for himself / inside” (Lines 32-33) his passive sexual partner. Stanza 4 describes a similar relationship, in which the dominant lover objectifies his partner by “push[ing his] flesh around” (Line 39) and using him as a “whipping boy” (Line 41), streaking his body with “the hoops of flame” (Line 43), that is, whip marks. The whipping boy, the “you” of the poem, himself objectifies another man in Stanza 7: “[Y]ou pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours” (Line 82). This implies a cycle of sexual objectification, where a man with the history of being objectified perpetuates objectification of others. While the sexual dynamic of domination and submission can be a mutually respectful and pleasurable practice, it slides into objectification when fueled by internalized anti-gay bias expressed as a hatred of oneself or of one’s gay lover.

Desire and Violence

Throughout the poem, desire and violence go hand in hand, almost as two sides of the same coin. At times, violence is a reaction against desire; at other times, violence is a confused expression of desire.

The first stanza depicts the consequences of a gay boy’s unwise voicing of his desire “to touch [the] hands and lips” of another boy (Line 5): The other boy reacts with violence, “holding your head underwater” (Line 1), “trying to kill you” (Line 2). In the fourth stanza, violence is not a rejection of desire but a form of it: “He hits you and he hits you and he hits you. / Desire driving his hands right into your body” (Lines 44-45). Seen in the larger context of the poem—a narrative where internalized anti-gay hostility results in a confluence of love and objectification—this violence is sadomasochistic and expresses the desire of both the man who is hitting and the man being hit.

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Sometimes the relationship between desire and violence is ambiguous. The fifth stanza refers to a “green-eyed boy” (Line 50) who “recoils as if hit, / repeatedly, by a lot of men, as if he has a history of it” (Lines 51-52). This description is only the speaker’s impression, and the reader learns nothing else about the boy’s history. However, since the poem as a whole reveals the speaker’s deep-seated, involuntary mental conflation of desire and violence, one may conclude that the speaker sees in the boy someone who either suffered anti-gay violence or is attracted to violent men, perhaps because of internalized anti-gay bias (See: Social Context).

Similar psychological complexity is implied in the final stanza, in which the speaker reflects on his relationships with men: “You take the things you love / and tear them apart” (Lines 80-81). Given that the totality of the poem suggests the speaker has learned to love only in ways that entail aggression or self-sabotage, these lines suggest his understanding of love, or sexual desire, as inevitably aggressive: claiming another man’s body as his own. The poem’s cosmos portrays the gravity of society’s sexual scapegoating: This interplay of desire and violence, inflicted externally by others’ biased narratives, can transcend anti-gay or sadomasochistic situations and become integral to one’s psychological makeup.

Detachment and Disconnect

Another prominent motif is the feeling of detachment—the unwillingness or inability to connect beyond sexual intercourse. The second stanza describes a boozy casual sexual encounter “in a rented bungalow” (Line 14). Intimate gestures imply no emotional connection. The speaker’s lover “is licking the whiskey / from the back of your wrist” (Lines 14-15), but “[h]e feels nothing” (Line 16). Once they have fulfilled their physical need, the two men expect little else from each other: “everything that was going to happen has happened” (Line 22). The speaker gets a cab fare from his lover and realizes he could have asked for more because the other man “couldn’t care less, either way” (Line 25). Detachment and indifference accompany sexual fulfillment.

The fifth and sixth stanzas offer variations of this motif. The speaker observes the boy “in the supermarket recoil[ing] as if hit” (Line 51) but cannot give him more than a momentary attention: “This is not your problem. / You have your own body to deal with” (Lines 53-54). Preoccupied with his own thwarted emotions—“You are feeling things he’s no longer in touch with” (Line 56)—the speaker experiences a passing awareness of the many things in life from which he is disconnected: “things happen every minute / that have nothing to do with us” (Lines 61-62). Some of that disconnect may be self-imposed since “no one can ever figure out what you want, / and you won’t tell them” (Lines 66-67). Thus, by choice or by necessity, the speaker’s life is marked by detachment, his own and other men’s.