This is a poem
About an enigma
A mystery tattooed in blood
You are gone
You can no longer speak your truth
Leaving us with so much mystery
We have a limited public record
Much of it silent about your sexuality
The evidence that you were queer
Confined to a brief isolated tweet
In truth
This is no one’s business but yours
But heterosexual dictatorship demands defiance
So we name our queerness
In this act of rebellion
Your sexuality a talisman after death
You were born in 1996
On the birthday we share
That day I got my first taste of mania
Perhaps feeling your birth in my queer spirit
I wonder if you felt what I felt
Desire for the touch of a man
Enchained and dirtied by shame
Was this the marrow of your pain?
You had visceral and electric charisma
But did you feel pride?
Did you feel held in community?
Your pain deeply rooted
In the soil of your father’s failure
In subterranean waters of shame and homophobia
Was this shame one of your awful things?
A reason you were better off dying
Was it part of why life was beautiful
And miserable
All at once?
Were you unable to see yourself validated?
Were you alienated by the tropes of queer community?
You said that you were bi
In a tweet
But we never saw this in depth
Or in color
I am left imagining your psychic cage
The trauma that made you an addict
The pain you numbed with 16 lines of cocaine
Self medicating to excess
Knowingly digging your own grave
I grasp for a narrative
Fusing what I know
With my wishful thinking
We hear you sing about love and loss
But never naming queer attraction in verse
The truth of the visceral queer tattoo on your soul
You were a humble creative giant
Exploring your tortured genius
Operating in the hyper-masculine world of hip hop
I imagine that I can know you in death
I commit to change
To dismembering tendrils of oppression
Aspiring to realize a radical anarchist vision
I may never know your story
Did you ever feel the love of a man?
Or was your bisexuality truncated?
Framed by isolated semi conscious sex
Sex one of you regretted the morning after
You are gone
But I wonder
Wanting to rewrite history
You found an elusive euphoria in toxic drugs
But could you have found that joy in love?
In a meaningful symbiotic relationship with a man?
You were boldly tattooed
Tattooed queer
The ink subcutaneous
Dreaming of its full emergence
Your sexuality an enigma
Your work prophecy
You were everybody’s everything
But what was everybody to you?
Did they love and accept
Or did they evade this truth?
Molding your secret shame
I sustain your legacy
Aspiring to create a new world
A world of sacred love
A world where you might have survived
–BYPO PHOENIX c)2024
