My name is Poetuma and I remember as a teenager writing love poems. They were

absolute fantasies. There was no particular lover to write too. But I wrote them in a certain kind of code,

sometimes using kind of overly heavy metaphors,

and other times literally creating a code

some obscure language that I subsequently forgot how to interpret.

Maybe everybody feels a little bit alone with the writing a love poem.

I think for me being gay, I very definitely felt that a love poem like that wasn't just

revealing what I thought about the fantasized lover,

but also it was revealing something about myself. So I needed the code, I needed the hiding,

not only to hide the fact that I was making everything up,

but that there was something I wasn't making up. A sleep you become a continent by Francisco X Al-Arcon, translated by Francisco Aragon.

A sleep, you become a continent, undiscovered, mysterious, long,

your legs, mountain ranges, encircling valleys, ravines,

night slips past your eyelids, your breath the swaying of the sea,

sprawled across the bed like a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth is the mouth of a sated volcano.

Oh, fragrant timber. How do you burn? You are so near and yet so far as you doze like a lily at my side.

I undo myself and invoke the moon.

I'm a dog watching over your sleep. Oh, So this poem by Francisco Ex-Alarcon, translated by Francisco Aragon is an erotic love poem between two men.

One is looking at the other and is using so many metaphors and some similes as well,

describing what it's like to watch the sleeping lover.

And looking at himself then, perhaps perhaps and looking at the space between them

in this erotic gaze and this gaze of love in this gaze that's filled with longing and yearning.

...