"Eighteen to Twenty-One" by David Trinidad (High Risk)
Sex Poems that Make You Sad
Not everyone has sex as a teenager. You could be religious, asexual, afraid of pregnancy, in the closet. You could be emotionally unstable, neurodivergent, mature enough to know that you’re not ready, looking for true love, etc.
Those who become sexually active at a relatively young age experience their most embarrassing sex between legal voting age and legal drinking age. These are the years of experimentation and identity finding. Also embarrassing and awkward memories including:
Writing “I think of you when I masturbate” in a love letter
Being shocked when the recipient is disgusted
Trying to think of something to say in that post-coital glow and landing on “That was fun!”
Enduring intense boredom in hopes of having sex
Intense loneliness as you realize you want real intimacy and not just the physical act.
Losing one's virginity because “my 16-year old niece is in town. She wants to fuck you. Come on over.”
Kissing strange beautiful women you just met because it's a science fiction convention
In 1989, the seven poems that make up this chapter were revolutionary for depicting young gay sex with all the pathos of straight sex. Unlike John Preston, David Trinidad is not sneaking off to bus terminals. Nor is he in the closet. He's writing about a time in his life full of experimentation, casual sex, jealousy, cheating and anonymous hook-ups.
David Trinidad has had a long career. He originally found success with the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, meeting many of the other High Risk authors including Bob Flanagan and Dennis Cooper. He earned an MFA to teach poetry and sold his archives to NYU. His poetry covers every subject from Barbie to Dusty Springfield to California. According to Alice Notley, his “most impressive gift is an ability to dignify the dross of American life, to honor both the shrink-wrapped sentiment of the cultural artifacts he writes about and his own much more complicated emotional response to them.”
Sadly, the High Risk editors were more interested in sex poems than his pop culture ruminations. In these poems, David's narrator is a young man eager to fuck but incapable of intimacy. He writes about the physical act in detail, but rarely goes beyond disappointment and frustration when it comes to actual emotions.
In the first poem, he writes about a thief named Nick. “Over a period of two weeks, he threatened to tell my parents I was gay, blackmailed me, tied me up, crawled through a window and waited under a bed, and raped me at knifepoint without lubricant.” Nick leaves him fucked up and in therapy. The last line is horrifying and funny, as he “learned that the burning in my rectum was gonorrhea, not nerves.”
He has better luck with other men. Poem 2 is about Dick who plays “Moon River” on the piano and “spit out my cum in the bathroom sink; I didn't ask why.” Dick is smitten. The narrator is bored. Poem 3 concerns a crush named Charlie and his friends who tell stories “about the bars and the baths, Fire Island, docks after dark.” Casually the narrator mentions that Charlie is a prostitute because some nights he comes home without a trick. Finally they had sex at last but sadly “his dick was so small it didn't hurt.”
The hedonism increases. Later poems talk about the list of guys he's fucked. He remembers them by anecdotes. There's Kevin and Kevin's best friend Howard with the sandpaper lips. There's Tom with the van who flirts with other men. He slugs Tom but also gets drunk before the fight. The last two poems stop caring about names. In poem 6, he loses interest in a potential one night stand and drives back to the bar to pick up another one. The last poem is about a blowjob in a porn theater. They do poppers. He ends up staring at the ceiling.
One can react to these poems the same way one reacts to that time in one's life. Like early adulthood, these poems feel unfinished and chaotic. Trinidad not only captures the hedonism of youth, but also the loneliness. As much as the narrator reveals personal details about small dicks and spitting cum and STDs, he does not reveal his feelings or his soul. Other David Trinidad poems are filled with emotions and joy and nostalgia. The poems of “Eighteen to Twenty-One” present a narrator cut off from all intimacy, vainly substituting emotional honesty with embarrassing details. In many ways, that's the truest part.
For more mature work by David Trinidad, here’s “Ode to Dusty Springfield”
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Another book by David Trinidad is Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems.