Working overtime as allegory, the soldier’s body hieroglyph of value can enter my poems because its representation has been severed from the real bodies of military men. And so, the Soldier appears, an exaggerated type like one you’d see in gay porn from the 70s when the artifice of narrative and the masque of character were still important for arousing pleasure. Or, he might appear among the Village People, that band of iconic queer bodies: Indian Chief, Construction Worker, Leatherman, Cowboy, Cop, Soldier. His figure occupies a place in the social imaginary tho its relation to me has been entirely mystified, stimulating desire while blocking any living tie to the bodies his figure represents occults except insofar as that tie already binds me. All these relations saturate my poems’ form, which alone allows me to feel them, to arouse and mobilize them against the mirror play of dead things.