My faded dream memories are highlighted by sexy black and white music videos
and yet his defenseless freckled skin, his sensitivity to illumination and to touch, to my mistakenly hurtful turn of phrase, not to mention the weak and tremulous light through his lambent luxurious locks…
All of this to illustrate through those color coded passages, confirming what I knew was truly blushing and divine.
The achromatic ginger waited lifetimes to be mine.
We fooled around all night while his parents wondered where he was.
We’d met at a kind of masquerade party, where he fed me tequila, but that was a different night.
The night we met I went home with him and his friend David, and although I slept naked between them nothing was allowed to happen… because all I wanted was him.
Looking back, I wonder… what would have happened if I’d not objected?
Would our threesome have continued? Would we all have remained friends? Had they ever shared a lover before? Did they do so long after I was gone?
I’ve never considered any of that, but it doesn’t really matter.
Back in the moment, after our night spent together and he’s still leaving.
He’s not even leaving my place because I’m staying with a friend.
Was it in Diamond Heights?
“It’s funny how beautiful people look when they’re walking out the door.”
Even then, I heard those words as I was watching him go, feeling the joy of what we’d just shared and the sting of our parting; back then I’m not sure if I’ll ever see him again.
I grab my camera, walk out onto the balcony, call his name and snap the picture that confirms Toni Collette’s line from “Velvet Goldmine”.
He was beautiful. Facebook lets me know that he’s still beautiful.
And my many naked memories are more beautiful than waking life would seem to deem possible.
Written by Jason Wright February 27, 2018
The photo / experience that inspired it.The spelling error printed version I took to my poetry group.
The beautiful savage drifting in the back of my mind is nearly forgotten beneath ginger dreams and transgender crushes.
“Everybody knows the boat is sinking” but if I’m not there to witness it… does it capsize and submerge or does it merely fade away?
Kate Bush struggles to reel me back in, but seductive as she is I have far too much to do and explore to immediately surrender to her siren sway.
And yet I want to return and travel through those fictional waters, which slowly swallowed me whole a mere decade before.
Ten years ago and so much has happened but an unexpected blessing of chance has allowed my survival that I may reencounter that phantom vessel; to finish the cycle which began before my awareness & to finally bring my drowning to completion.
They struggle through spin, repeatedly heated, Spritely ghosting across the years to inspire long after intentions are forsaken, forgotten and buried.
The contradictions are too numerous to name as each star burns to nothing plummeting from the inverse sky in a brilliant spark unseen but heard in echoes of erotic aural bliss.
Not all brothers need be the same or enraptured by the mirror ball illumination glittering on the skin of our shared origin story.
The aspects of dissimilar experiences guide us to drastically different outcomes as we are nourished (and sometimes poisoned) by the same rainbow roots.
When you walked in to Starbs with my man on your arm in your charmingly gay jeans, I smiled and I thought that this could be fun.
I ran into an old customer who told me about his son’s tumbling class as I watched you both ordering coffee, with an easy, relaxed manner, that spoke volumes of what was to come.
Your sing song ramblings were the essence of adorable and you seemed younger than your pictures, while also managing to look completely different from whatever angle I spied you from.
We agreed on Buffy’s Gift and disagreed on LGBT actors, though not in the typical, angry, grating way, which Aaron and I had just discussed in relation to a similar friend, who has already secretly been mentioned here.
We had matching board games which we managed to win before I took pain killer when I expected no more games to be played.
This, aside from the tongue fuck of a kiss which was seemingly dared and then shared without mercy.
Later, that other kiss on the kitchen counter, and you were the ghost of Sean Mobley, whispering across my skin before we all retired to the place I expected us not to go… which in all fairness, I had insisted on.
There were obstacles to overcome but in a relaxingly hazy, lustful way, or that’s how I experienced it at the time.
Your sexy ass, which I yearned to devour, was sadly out of service… and my painkiller infused erection was quickly down for the count, yet your beautifully thick dick and mouthwatering sack were open for business.
I did fucking love your sex drenched cock, stretching me open after riding your face like you were some kind of bucking bronco.
You were energetic, switching positions, still looking different from every angle, painfully / pleasurably thrusting deep inside me, filling the rubber with an impressive load of cum.
You left soon after, since you don’t like to cuddle, and the two of you needed to be up early the next morning.
You took Ian McKellen (as James Whale) with you and we traded messages on this or that service but I don’t hear your voice in those words.
In these random exchanges it’s hard to tell what is real; hard to tell if we’re going to see you again.
Perhaps you really were just a shadow of Sean, come to sing me carols and wake me with a kiss.
But I’d like to talk to you again: face to face.
It’s not all about your dick; it’s everything else too; all those angles are views I’d like to explore.
My sentences sent to convey this seem awkward and desperate, but that’s not how they’re meant.
Like I said, it’s hard to tell what is real in the light of day; hard to decipher if what we experienced was the beginning of friendship or merely the end of a short, yet satisfying game.
Patrick shakes his head; dancing in place as they come for him once again in figment and thought, in memory & dream.
He clacks away at obsidian keys as he struggles to spin pain into art, flesh into word, bravery into poems pressed together in collective battle scars; assorted victories and losses on his way to documented catharsis.
A cascade failure of memories wiped away by drugs struggles toward a surface stain of calculated depth.
Flickering images like tongues of flame shimmer through a train car of strangers… ignited and extinguished in the same breath… I feel their warm glow long after they are nothing but smoke and ash.
Cold rain sparkle pricks me awake as I stumble through the mist into another dreaming space of bright chill and a remembering of self.
Memories are dreams of a time that no longer exists.
We were all dead years ago and my struggling ghost is nothing so rare or sacred as that fumbling child faggot who plateaued in the momentary recognition of shared desire.
In July he’s beautiful… beyond what I’d known, beckoning behind me, breathlessly below me, and he’s blatantly blessed my insides; benevolently and becomingly.
Less than 2 weeks ago and he was harrowing… having hazed our harmonation when he hollered he’d rather have HIV than herpes simplex.
The lilting listing of letters STOPS as I’m overwhelmed to trembling at hearing the sentence uttered within my lifetime, let alone with such a haunting sense of longing.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
I want to scream. Want to shake him. Want to slap him for such a blasphemous confession.
But I hold him close as I shiver and he whispers about pills and stigma, outbreaks and misconceptions, the men (plural) who’ve rejected him, and the men (plural) who’ve accepted him since his November 2017 infection.
His illness merely scares me but his promiscuity terrifies me; I am nothing if not a child of the AIDS pandemic.
He was amazing when he was inside of me back in July. I even dreamed of a life spent together. The three of us, I mean.
But he wanted someone all his own and so he never stopped looking: in Seattle, Canada, Hawaii or New York City.
He tells me that he was in my place years before and our symmetry stuns me all the more.
I pull him on top of me, my legs wrapped around him, as I whisper in his ear about our blissful summer night and how I thought I’d scared him away with my longing for a life together.
He silences my tears with his own silent weeping; his voice shattering into a broken child’s quivering as he tells me that I’m not to blame; that it was he who frightened himself away.
Fear defines his every action; tinges the edges of every decision… I hear it in his voice and I know that he speaks the truth.
There is no pre-exposure prophylaxis to be taken for this unease.
He leaves us, naming us blameless and yet there is blood on my hands…
For although we remain in the land of the uninfected, none of us could ever be classified as clean.