"God, as you by now have heard, is love. In the world of writer Trebor Healey, love is certainly sacred. But in Healey's poems and fiction human love, never free of the bodies that people bring with them, is a product of how these bodies rub. The love that most often interests Healey is found in sex between men-whether that sex occurs in the potential of a glance or in the sweaty fact of interlocking parts. So the sacred gets gloriously profane in his work as well. ('Love is small / But sustaining / Like a cumshot' he writes in the poem 'The Castro'.) That profanity--the inescapable, ultimately invigorating vulgarity of slapping, sloshing flesh and its fluids--rescues Healey's poetry from the new age inanity that infects much writing that tries to capture on the page the ineffability of the erotic.

"The frank and frequent carnality of Healey's poetry makes it hot--so hot that it often attains the level of stroke poetry (well, at least it does for its ideal reader, like me). As I wrote Healey by e-mail when I asked if he'd be available for an interview, with its 'combination of linguistic verve and erotic punch over so many poems,' I couldn't think of any poetry like his. In Trebor Healey's universe, 'God is what happens when people fuck' (as he writes in his poem 'Evildoers'). Readers of a Catholic background might hear in this a wild echo of the catechism's contention that 'God is the third party to every Christian marriage'--many canyons beyond it. Healey, raised a Catholic, still carries large chunks of its culture around with him. They inform his worldview and saturate his language. But the writer has been almost as marked by spiritual traditions beyond the one he was born into.

"Trebor ('Robert' backwards, like it's a spell or maybe the nominal equivalent of sexual inversion) Healey has been publishing poetry and short stories, some of them erotic (three of which I've had the pleasure to edit), in little magazines and on Web sites for more than a dozen years. In 2003 Harrington Park Press published his shattering, cleansing first novel, Through It Came Bright Colors--an account of how two simultaneous wrenching experiences (a brother's unrelenting cancer and first love with a damaged, brilliant and beautiful guy who sinks into addiction) remakes the book's twenty-something narrator. It appeared to strong reviews and, out of nowhere, won a couple of prestigious prizes (the Violet Quill Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award) over candidates by much better-known writers.

"Recently Suspect Thoughts Press has done Healey's fans (old ones and the new ones he's bound to garner now) the inestimable service of gathering under one cover 65 of his poems, originally published over the course of 14 years in lots of obscure magazines and anthologies, many now out-of-print. All but a couple of these poems are overtly erotic, and most explicitly so. The book, Sweet Son of Pan, arranges them without respect to chronology into three irregular sections of 28, 28 and 7 poems between an introductory sestina and a closing benediction.

"Boyz good and bad are immortalized throughout the book, but especially in the first section, Hymns to Boys not Named Ganymede. The second section, In Praise of Gods and Other Heavenly Bodies, develops the themes of erotic love, both sacred and (especially in poems of praise to particular body parts) the profane. (The titles of the latter poems will give you a taste: 'Dick Prayer', 'Melchor's Ass', 'Nipples', 'Boner Poem', 'Ode to His Butt' and 'Aristocracy of the Scrotum'.) The final section features poems that, in their marking of one gay man's losses, personal and communal, feel elegiac; these are yoked with a few that are ultimately almost aggressively optimistic, prophetically looking ahead at a world teeming with man-on-man sex. (If you want it enough it will happen.)

"The poems of Sweet Son of Pan are not traditionally religious, yet they draw on (and frequently explicitly invoke) three major spiritual traditions, the pagan face of classic myth, Buddhism and the Catholicism I've mentioned. From all three traditions Healey finds in the divine a particularly human face--and parts of the anatomy somewhat further south.

"Sweet Son of Pan is structured around a series of invocations to Pan. The son of a divine father (Hermes) and mortal mother (Penelope), Pan in myth was the demigod that celebrated the basic animal nature of man, the patron of flocks and fucking. Some versions of the tale conflated him with the Greek figure Dionysus, the goat-god of wine and the bacchanal. Bacchus and his pals became the satyrs of the Greek drama with their goatish need to breed all the time and their huge artificial phalluses. That these unrelievedly randy boyz traveled in herds has lent them a certain homoerotic charge, at least in the modern imagination. Healey's Pan is all this and more. In the poet's argument against fighting and fundamentalism ('Pan on Terrorism') the man-god ends the poem with the order: 'Now put down your explosives / Drop your pants / And serve god and country'. More than once in the book Healey invokes those contemporary sons of Pan, the Radical Faeries. In the different incarnations of Pan we find in Healey's book, the poet calls upon god and man and the animal in man, the boy in man and even the woman in man ('You're my crazy cum-crane of a cock / and my assiduous asshole androgyne'-'Pan').

"In the poet's Buddha the divine again walks the earth and as such functions similarly to Pan but with more equanimity. Buddha appears a few times in a few different guises, but his presence is more important in an attitude of final, universal acceptance of all things that pervades these poems. We find the spirit in Healey's other writing. In his novel, the narrator writes of his first love affair: 'In the doomed places, where hopelessness reigned, I found something better than hope: a world with no future.' The energy and restlessness of Healey's work pushes its Buddhist principals toward the fruitful nihilism of the most spirited punk rock. (He's written for the homocore band Pansy Division.) Though more reflective, the poems and prose at times partake of the 'no future' that Johnny Rotten sings of with such giddy ferocity that the incantation becomes its own exit from hopelessness. Here sex often provides that function: '…paradise is nothing/ The vanishing point of sexual release' ('Pan on Terrorism').

'When the poet pleads in 'Pan' 'Fuck me now, Pan' or in 'Ode to Buddha' 'Fuck me right out of being', he shares a disposition of ecstatic masochism with the very Christian John Donne of the holy sonnet 'Batter my heart three-person'd God'. Healey's Catholicism is far from the dry intellectual strain that, descended from Augustine and Aquinas, has, in the wake of the rise of the Jesuits, controlled the official church since the counter-reformation. Rather, it derives from an earlier tradition, at once earthier and more ecstatic, embodied most notoriously in the poet and nature-boi Francis of Assisi. (In 'Forest Service', Healey's story in this issue of Inches, the narrator says to his fucker, 'You're a regular St. Francis, Kip.')

"Healey by his admission has drawn inspiration from the Marian heresy, which elevated Mary the virgin mother to a position of overriding importance. Jesus himself, god and man, has been to most Christians the human interface to god. But Mary, divinity's vessel, herself less divine than a god-made-man, is even more approachable (like Pan or Buddha). Healey's twists on this tradition purge it of burdensome virginity and bear comparison with the blasphemies of French novelist Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. Sweet Son of Pan contains four 'Our Lady' poems ('of Fresh Produce', 'of the Fine Torso,' 'of the Showers' and 'of the Locker Room'). (In Healey's novel, the narrator's first love Vince becomes 'Our Lady of thievery and junk...Our Lady of All the Sorrows and All the Wrong Moves...' Earlier in the novel a looming mountain mimics 'an image of the Virgin Mary in her mantel-silent, present, like a last ruin of the faith we'd been raised with.')

"Poems like 'Our Lady of the Showers' discover the sacred in the everyday ('He appeared / A vision in the showers of the YMCA / One bumpy blue vein / curving rakishly across his uncut cock'). 'Our Lady of the Locker Room' finds it in the totally debased (steam room circle jerk). In my interview with Healey he talks of the pride he takes in sanctifying the profane. Beyond that, these poems bring to the sexual all the ardor of the devotional. In 'Our Lady of the Fine Torso' the line 'and I drop my pants like crutches' manages to tear the veil from the erotic that pulses just under the skin of every pilgrim's totalizing desire for cure, for transfiguration, for salvation, for a really good lay, for the place where agony and ecstasy touch: transcendence.

"In the glorious male bodies of 'Fine Torso' and other 'Our Lady' poems, Healey finds both genders and plenty of room for play. He unearths a nurturing mother in the pale bare torso of a Marky Mark underwear poster hanging in a bullet-riddled San Francisco bus shelter. In the poetic logic of this poem, the miracle milk of semen manages a metamorphosis from 'white roses' to 'broken pockets of change' to 'white pigeons' to bullets. (Healey like all fine writers has images he returns to over and over; in his extraordinary story 'Pancake Circus' the narrator says: '...I pulled like a madman, again and again, on my slot handle, hitting jackpot after jackpot until my bed was plain lousy with change.' Here poetic image gets extended into full narrative vignette. Later in the story's final paragraph, the narrator, though now in jail, says: 'I played the slots and won'--this triumph of the abject has precedent in Buddhism, Catholicism and Genet.)

"This cultural superstructure I've outlined--like the vault of some vast image bank--supports Healey's cosmos. It wouldn't matter except that the stuff of Healey's poems, his series of hot, mercurial boyz, proves so fucking engaging. We catch them and their throbbing bodies by flashes in language that etches them on the retina with aching palpability. These are the Lives of Trebor Healey's Saints--except he cautions us, 'There are more cocks than saints' ('Religion'). These cocks that Healey is bent on memorializing swing less often from a recognizable saint than from one of the badboyz for whom the writer has an eternal soft spot (and obvious hard-on). 'But all he ever did was fuck and fight his way through the night' he writes in 'Milarepa'. In Healey's fiction such boyz can be poison. In the novel Through It Came Bright Colors the addict, sociopath and beloved, Vince, winds up running off with the narrator Neill's car and cash. In the white-hot erotic story 'Pancake Circus', Clown Daddy, the big-dicked eye of a libidinal storm, winds up sucking the narrator into a life beyond queer that lands him a long prison term.

"In Sweet Son of Pan's, 'We Started Out Janitors'--a poem as perfect as a cumshot-the poet and his cohort wind up fucking on the job and robbing the restaurant where they work and fucking and robbing it again until they're fired and so what? Like many of the best poems in the opening sections of the book, 'We Started Out Janitors' is a taut, if discontinuous, narrative. 'When we jack off together / In his truck' is how 'San Gabriel Valley' begins, and the poem delivers on the promise of its teasing opening lines.

"Though lyric, these fictions get told in a language as rough and urgent as the sex that's often being described. 'We both had big ugly dicks that we treated like food' Healey writes in 'We Started Out Janitors'. Metaphor is hard and comes wrapped in the vernacular (until it gets stripped to the skin). Writer Kevin Killian has called the language of Healey's prose 'muscular'. This might sound like special pleading for a novelist who's not just a poet but a homo too. And yet the description is accurate. Healey's language, both prose and poetry, is muscular, sinewy and sinuous, and it cleaves to the ever-beating body. In general, the grittier and more particular Healey gets the better for the poem. When he has an urge to immortalize a boy, he deftly deploys his arsenal (image, description, character and bits of plot) to memorably lyric ends.

"In fewer than a dozen poems in the book, Healey shows what an offhand master he is of poetic forms, both the strict, repetitive ones derived from troubadour tradition (sestina, villanelle, pantoum and envoy) and of the looser ode and elegy that extend back to the Greeks. In the opening 'Sestina for Pan' the repeating images of hoof, bone, tongue, horn, seed and pipes all flash by (and flash again) like the cards of the most fluent of card sharps: the reader sees it all and still he marvels and wonders how. Even tighter is 'How the Lion Got Its Roar' ('I like it / when your asshole / grabs my cock / like a hand'), a queering of a fable Aesop never told that goes by in a blink. A concluding twist feels as weirdly right as a Kafka parable.

"Several poems work out an extended metaphor over several irregular stanzas: this boy is a salad, that one is Thanksgiving dinner. Some of these are chains of image in praise of particular parts of the male body. In 'Nipples' the nubs of the title become 'guileless eyes', become 'moon and sun', become 'testicles', and even get attached to the more primary gay male erogenous zones of asshole (by virtue of being spherically imperfect) and penis (for the quality of skin). Similarly in 'Ode to His Butt' the object of the poet's lust suggests 'ripe mangoes', 'the sun and the moon both', 'a couple of planets', 'big flat round stones' and '2 cool pools of water'.

"For me the least successful poems are the ones in which the essayistic impulse swamps Healey's great twin gifts for lyric and narrative. This includes the nine-page long 'Fraternity'. After poetry, the discursive argument here, however much the reader might agree, seems pedestrian (and, once or twice, tendentious). Still, it's hard to argue with the case the poet makes and it's almost always engaging. And how can you wish away a poem that contains the lines: 'A penis is forever a boy / And when it rises like the sun / it gives the boy in the man away'?

"This is not to say that Healey's poetry is only good when it's taut. Here's a stanza from 'Paris, Texas':

My memory is
strung like a wire across the Great Basin
You're hanging all over it like laundry
flapping in the wind
your eyes and mouth flashing like glare
settling like a mirage

"Though the pyrotechnics of language are typical of Healey, atypically the body of the boy in question can only be evoked in the negative in a poem full of 'glare' and 'parched bones' in the desert. The first line of the stanza, adding as it does unnecessary space on the page, mimics the attenuation of the memory of him. The lost boy becomes laundry, his missing body fetishized. With 'flashing' eyes and mouth, he's a 'mirage'. Healey couples the common image, flashing eyes, with the not so common flashing mouth--which can conjure pictures both of sex and beached fish. Longing makes the boy's haunting absence painfully palpable.

"In Healey's poetry the subject matter (the love of comrades) and the loose amplitude of his line (except in the few poems that obey strict verse form), situate his work firmly in the tradition Walt Whitman, homo daddy of so much American poetry since him. (The reader tends to tumble through Healey's verse; there is one full stop 'period' in all the poems, and that comes after the term 'OD.'--which seems to demand terminus for purely conceptual reasons.)

"In my interview with Healey he says, 'Whitman urged us to "sing the body electric," so I'm only taking his advice and doing my job.' More particularly, Healey works within the Whitmanesque tradition as explicitly queered by head Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. (Walt's homosexuality had been for the most part implicit.) Healey, despite his love of tight verse forms and facility with them, is (if you haven't guessed already) ultimately an unbridled romantic. (In his novel, Healey invokes major Beat fiction writers William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.)

"Early in Sweet Son of Pan there appears an ecstatic poem of praise that announces its debt to Walt in its title ('I Sing the Dick Crooked') and carries it out in its careening ambition and expansive language ('singing in the sticky rain from a thousand bent cocks'). In poems like 'Iowa' we find a Whitmanesque conflation of the poet's body with the landscape, typified in an utterance like: 'I let the entire continent fuck me hard / sucked it right up my asshole'.

"Walt's post-Stonewall ghost surfaces in lots of poems that conjure up an extended brotherhood of buddy sex, even in nominally heterosexual settings like a gang ('I have a dream too... / That young gangbangers / will pull up at stoplights / and lean their bare hips out of cars / to cum on their rivals windows'-- 'Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., South Central L.A.'). In a sexually repressed, decidedly non-gay 'Fraternity', Healey posits a Whitmanesque ideal by its negation: a vision of fratboys scattered across campus in bathroom stalls and cubicles, alone, masturbating. (This constellation of sexual isolation, even though we readers have to connect the dots ourselves, is still pretty sexy.)

"The next-last poem of the last section of the book finds Healey, on the occasion of Ginsberg's death, memorializing the older poet, recalling a sighting of him, lamenting his loss and with him the loss of a culture. The poem broadens an elegiac strain that's run through many poems of this section of the book. In my interview with Healey I describe the succeeding long poem, 'The Star Spangled Boner' as 'a defiant, sex-drenched queering of all America'. Here the Whitmanesque impulse, in all its appetite and optimism, comes roaring back with a visionary drive too strong to be stopped by retrospective sorrow. ('I wanna open my mouth and swallow the whole fucking corn crop of Kansas.') Ginsberg hovers over the poem too, in the tone of apocalyptic equanimity that the older poet perfected in the best of his post-Buddhist anti-war poetry of the 1960s. (Over and over again while reading 'The Star Spangled Boner' I flashed back to Ginsberg's 'Wichita Vortex Sutra', the poem that, when I stumbled upon it in the 8th grade in a magazine, made me decide to be a writer.) Healey's poem ends 'sweet land of sodomy / Of thee I sing…' The line has the quality of a comic throw-off. But it's also the complex gesture of a poet seizing a patriotic song, saying it's his just as much as anyone's, queering it, invoking his forbear Walt Whitman in doing so and, because it's a song not a poem he's misquoting, evoking an actual singing body, maybe even calling that ideal reader to sing along, and all at once.

"All that's left after that is 'L'Envoi, or Pagan Benediction', an entirely soberer affair. This blessing is too clear-eyed not to be mixed. After 'The Star Spangled Boner', as wide as all America, the envoy, conforming to a strict, succinct line and repeating pattern, feels as dense as a rock. As powerful as any poem in the book, it hits like one as well. Unpacking it would fill a column of its own. Enough here to say that in the poem Healey identifies trees with erections, ink with semen and the risks that his generation of writers took in the poetry they wrote with the risks inherent in the sex they had. He salutes colleagues who have fallen in the service of either, calls back the trees that were felled to accommodate their scribblings and takes his place among the new growth that their past efforts have seeded. I keenly await Trebor Healey's future efforts."

—The Hanging Judge, Inches