Part I:
“Don’t. Don’t do this.”
He whimpers
and I wonder if I ever dreaded such desire
so much or so unconvincingly,
but then as waves of shimmering memory
crash down upon us
I know that I was once
as fearful and thirsty
as this unsteady stripling
cursed by his impetuous prick.
The tremble in his voice tells me everything.
How many times have I
heard that quivering?
Enough to know what will happen next.
Enough to know that he’ll kiss me
for the first time before we leave
this place and that his world will
never be the same,
although others may never know.
I wonder if he’ll be clumsy,
fearfully failing
and requiring my lessons?
I’ve never been a very good teacher.
But I needn’t have worried.
His inaugural kiss is all
skillful struggle & instinct;
like he’s remembering
a previously forgotten lyric
which he sings into me,
the movement resonating
with my own dimly recalled
early fumblings –
old ghosts coming to light
and making experienced virgins of us both.
Part II:
Years unfurl before us
and we continue to cross paths, if not swords…
never quite friends, but never enemies either.
We are could-have-been-lovers
who never really liked one another…
or maybe I want him desperately
but have never admitted it to him,
never admitted it to myself,
and I protect this secret
with a feigned indifference.
Perhaps he wanted me too once,
but the injurious nature of his initiation
was too overwhelming;
too persistently all knowing,
causing him to deny any self identified failing
as commonplace as an honest, inexhaustible,
uncontrollable lust.
The night I find him in the cemetery
with a new student
he actually drags the boy over to me
to tell me that Ian is dead.
He kisses the boy goodbye,
all casual and masterful now
before he tags along with tears
captured in his long black lashes.
When he reaches for my hand,
I allow this silent sign language apology…
as we stumble through a midnight city
that once witnessed our virginal beginnings.
And as the sun threatens to wake us
from our surreal remembering,
he pulls me to him with eyes closed…
desperate to feel the familiar,
if shockingly innocent touch of my skin on his,
rather than the aching emptiness
our former brother once inhabited.
I don’t want this, I think,
this isn’t how I’ve wanted him at all…
yet I surrender to him
like the tide
pulled unfailingly
by the moon
and his sway.
A killing kindness
that murders us both.
Part III:
16 years
and he doesn’t recognize me
on the underground.
I can’t blame him;
I actually don’t recognize myself
and I lack the reflection
of his distant, unchanging gaze.
I watch him watching others
but feel no need to illuminate him
as I flow out and beyond him…
Like I’m someone who never drowned in those icy depths.
I pretend and become
a formerly drunken sailor,
now sober, awake,
and ignorant of all that took place that long night before,
save a few vague images
and the phantom bruising smudge
of a lingering question,
raised by the harshest of realities.
We once lost and found ourselves
within each other…
within the loss of innocence
and the commingling of grief,
but now,
here in this place
beneath a sea of inspiring destruction,
what we discovered
in that stilted, tilted, ordinary wonderland
has been forgotten.
We drowned in the flood of all that came after,
and though we may find ourselves again (and again)
in the eyes of flaming strangers,
the fire which burned within us has been lost forever,
save in dreams
which melt away
every day as we wake.
Written by Jason Wright
December 5, 2017