AND I DO SING

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Introduction: The Elemental Prance of Life            

        

It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than 

anything else in the world.  

                                          Frank O’Hara   

Measure, measure your life in love.  

‘Rent’ lyric (cited in Román’s Acts of 

Intervention, 283)  

  

death comes in it doesn’t say hello it stops and will not go   

death comes in I taste it on your lips your  ass your cock your 

tits   

                                          Joe Lewis  

death . . . I taste it; At the outset the stage is set for a collection of 

poetry that simultaneously laments and celebrates both life and 

death as elemental to each other’s existence. Any rudimentary 

online thesaurus reveals the presence of prance -  “the elemental 

prance of life” - as something akin to strutting, flouncing, cavorting, 

frolicking, swanning. Thus death is introduced within a complex 

lexicon of living life to its fullest without forgetting – by re- 

membering – the love that has left us but continues to live – to 

prance - through our hearts.  

to prance: The list of verbs describing fey physical gestures is 

endless. In David Román’s formative text ACTS of Intervention; 

Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS we are reminded of the 

“anxiety and sense of inevitability already experienced by gay men 

in daily life.” (Román 237). In the poetry of Joe Lewis this prance – 

this anxiety - becomes a kind of self-elegy, an almost musical 

refrain for the poet himself to begin with and to go back to over 

and over again over the course of twelve elegant meditations that 

move in and out of mirth and tragedy, testifying poetically to the 

life of someone living with HIV for a prolonged period. Within a 

larger personal scheme this self-elegaic quality radiates outward 

toward a single object of desire (dedication to Michael Kelly). But 

within that singularity lies the central paradox about sharply 

personal poetry that attempts to speak of historic tragedy around 

mistaken perceptions of illness. When we speak of a kind of death 

still so fraught with scapegoating and homophobia we speak to a 

multitude of  suffering and surviving as we speak privately and 

intimately of and to ourselves. 

death sentences/syntax; The AIDS pandemic, having claimed so 

many lives, finds a quiet knowing solitude in this collection of 

poems, and garners strength for those of us coming into the 

awareness of HIV within our own lives and bodies during a very 

different period than the one when Joe was first diagnosed. When 

I was diagnosed, almost twenty years later, Joe was among the 

first people I spoke to about it. I had remembered telling him, when 

I first heard his news, that this was not a death sentence, and 

soon after, when I first heard Joe read some of the work included 

in this collection, I was struck by Joe’s repetition of the idea of an 

approaching death. It became – and continues to be – an affirming 

and cathartic moment for me, where I can simultaneously embrace 

and expel the intense fear of the kind of death that has taken the 

lives of my closest friends. Joe is among the few who survived that 

early period and his poems speak of a survival that sustains itself 

through what he calls a “re-membering” throughout the collection. 

His sentences and stanzas are crafted with the syntax for 

surviving. 

die laughing; In Die Laughing we are confronted with a journey 

through a party-like loop of sorrow laced with fun-loving, lightly 

erotic and popular images that bring us this sense of mirth and 

sadness through a wondrous run-on lyricism. 

dreams ending forgotten re-membering lush undergrowth 

mould, oxidized copper broken glass sometimes I feel like 

laughing in your face kissing your eyelids your spine making you 

mine I hold you we cry yesterday a friend of a friend reported your 

death last night I saw you and,,, .stillness in my heart dreams 

ending forgotten like Roy and Dale we ride off into the sunset 

make history bake pies swim in the Nile and die laughing  

And then Sing Me A Song, with its beautifully hedonistic litany of 

remembered screams, games, and unsung possibilities;  

      

 . . . We danced drank beer in discos too old and too young to care 

about yesterday and too unaware to make plans for the day after 

next 

      Too much was left unsaid I’m too mad to be sad and so sorry 

for you to care about myself   

I can not believe we still play these games, but the game isn’t over 

till the last man is gone but we can still sing       songs . . .  

      I don’t need to know “what’s going on”   

      Somebody   

      Please  

  

      Just sing me a song  

But finally, with the closing poem Really I Forgot, the sum of the 

poet’s collected parts - whether they exist in twelve poems or over 

a prolonged period of a profoundly unwelcome awareness of 

mortality – they rise up out of this extended elegiac refrain, as it 

soothes us, frightens us, and teaches us to survive through the 

presence of memory. 

      

You tell me a well constructed poem is like a house,   

      I laugh and call you a louse, love like art like life is a bad 

dream, sometimes, sometimes its just good plain fun, a deep dark 

green woods overgrown and dank, decaying, feeding on itself, a 

video image courtesy of the rock and roll industry, my mother, old 

and broken down on hands and knees planting tulips in suburbia, 

you stand screaming alone and forgotten loved   

      I said I’d call, say I didn’t have time, but really I just forgot 

      It is now September the cool night air, that smell one 

remembers so well the colour of the sky, moon light, memory.   

       

Re-membering.   

       

This is not a dream, not a sad song, but life, sweet life. You reach 

back a day a year a minute and you forget grammar. You lose 

language you scream you laugh and in-ability you pull stones from 

the earth.  

      You look forward to yesterday and you love yourself.  

The mocking playfulness of the opening rhyme, followed by the 

notion of looking forward to the presence of yesterday as it filters 

in and out of daily – hourly - consciousness - identifies those of us 

who have used performance - whether it be poetry on the page or 

aloud onstage or in a cherished conversation with a close friend 

and/or lover we do not want to lose too soon - a suitable 

conclusion and introduction to the beauty and the value of these 

twelve poems.  

postscript - rent; An especial love of Broadway and the many 

conflicted attempts to bring our lives to the musical stage finds 

subtle expression in these poems as they majestically move from 

one death refrain to the next, soaring across years of life and loss, 

ultimately ending and beginning in a thirst for what Joe has called 

“look[ing] forward to yesterday and loving yourself.” Past and 

present commingle strategically and beautifully as Joe Lewis 

allows himself and his reader to measure our lives in love. 

David Bateman