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.
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.
The monsters which stand between me and true understanding in this world of my own making; unintentional as they may be they must still die to set me free.
My mind and body are split into fragments which collectively form the state of my being.
The Man I am proud I am becoming, (I’ve worked very hard to become that man), is excited and happy that someone he loves will have this opportunity to explore and experience that divine feeling of mutual lust and reciprocal desire, because I know that he’s beautiful beyond reason, beyond any other lover that I have ever known.
I want him to know this. I want him to embrace this and to accept who he truly is. I want him to know and feel joy and accomplishment. I want him to achieve self-actualization.
A less developed part of me worries that if he knows how much he is wanted he may choose to leave me for multiple partners.
But then again, why would he do such a thing when he already has someone that allows him the embraces of others?
And if he can so easily be seduced from my side is it worth denying him such knowledge?
I love him and could never hurt him in this way.
My inner child is small and hard and terrified of what’s to come; so excited that he may shit his pants, wet himself, embarrass Daddy with his hungry child erection, which comes and goes repeatedly based on levels of excitement and fear.
These images are too base and too powerful to be ignored.
The man that I was before, only years ago now, is fearful of mistakes repeating themselves; liars and cheaters and assholes who could not give me the attention that I needed as they abandoned me to explore all that I secretly desired.
But this time it’s not a secret.
My Daddy knows my shame and my lust.
Daddy knows what hungers make me hard; what makes my legs wobble and my knees shake.
Daddy knows that I call out for him when I’m alone and stroking on the edge of understanding, on the brink of destruction and the verge of orgasm.
Daddy knows how small I am, how much Daddy’s cock overshadows my tiny boyhood penis.
Daddy punishes me; his words whispered lustfully into my hungry bottom’s ears; spanking me with diapers, fucking my mind and my asshole; bringing all that I am to the light that I might solidify and individuate from all that has come before now.
Daddy knows that I crave his calculatedly insincere cruelty to make me cum; to take me deeply into lustful spaces beyond which I’ve yet dared to explore… Impossible places that I cannot reach without his loving embrace of seemingly vicious incantations which (spoken lovingly) brutally summon the fragments within me; bringing me to coalescence in this savage intensity, this immensity of emotion and sensation which I want / need to explore in the paradoxically identical agency from which his own exploritive needs are encountered; that wellspring beneath his sense of sensual worth and attraction which unites us in mutual self sexual exploration.
We’re two sides it would seem of the same themed wet dream that has haunted forever and needs to be conquered.
Two shades of wanting of the same kind of haunting that has taunted forever: we must slay our monsters.
And in the aftermath of our battles be they excessive or successful failures I know that I can hold him and tell him he is loved; the way Daddy has told me that I am loved after he punishes me with unrestricted access to his most insightful lessons.
There are other, lesser fears of disease (given our precautions) but they cannot prevent me from finding my truth in the search for his own.
I love you. I love this. I love that we can hold one another as we walk through the terrifying war zones of our youth.
