In the office in the freshly minted safe space, Tina Fey’s lesbian twin speaks to me of exposure exercises, the New Yorker, sexual disconnection & other terrifying topics that (to my credit) only momentarily make me think about hurting myself.
Intense.
But even in the shadow of all of this trauma Bright Young Man Scrubbed & Gleaming catches sight of my mostly random hotness and the moment of recognition / Attraction / Shared Experience SURGES <——————————————-> BETWEEN US signals sent and received with no conscious effort:
The gentleman next to me is charming in his quietude… when he speaks he is kind with some type of speech trouble – says he’s headed down to lower level of Hell, Beaver, near Wall Street.
He wears a wedding band made of gold on his left hand – his right hand looks broken while the left hand holds a dusty old flip phone…
Aaron hands me his fancy bells & whistles and I smile as I read about the war Sue is waging on my behalf: Aaron loves me.
The boy across the field behind my house had more in common with me than ancestors; most other kids I played with were related to me but he was always my favorite
because of the way he looked at me… Later in life he was damaged in a tragic accident and our future conversations ceased to be.
In an unseen instant he was ripped away although he was still alive, and that’s more than can be said for others lost in that era of AIDS and ignorance.
I shake the love letter postcards out of my skull and pick one at random:
I remember his breath on my neck; the feel of our young bodies pressed together like the pages of a trashy tattered copy of a seldom read incest fantasy, which I will forever remember as the first time that I made love; the first time that someone I loved made love to me.
His reaching, reciprocated touch was tender, terrified and then joyous.
His movement: considerate, then brutal within the landscape of a language that we both finally understood.
In our joining, our words from a hundred lying conversations gained new meaning and were finally made honest.
His kiss informed me that I was never truly alone.
His cock translated every secret code I had ever witnessed in the eyes of countless lonely strangers.
His thrusting within me within the home of his grandparents… that place between sheets and layers of blood magic was always and will forever be sacred.
My love letter postcard memories are holy relics now tumbling out of my decades old skull.
Rectangular snapshots of a time before we were allowed to be who we truly were…
In a time before he lost who he truly, secretly had been…
A time when we had dreamed of a very different future that had been reflected in our tangle of shared flesh and blood.
everyone looks like everyone else, or at least everyone I meet of late reminds me of others I’ve known
like my life is a friendly little shop filled to the brim with charming knick-knacks, inspirational quotations and echos of a hundred baristas filling thousands of coffee cups… where lilting Donnie Darko music plays as Mobley Mouse’s older younger brother sits like a ghost in the corner of my clearly obsessed brain.
FireLion smiles as my other sibling selves recite poetry with all the power that we can muster.
This night is as queer as the gay mohawked punk who complimented my jacket on my way to the A train in the village, only the night isn’t actually half as interesting.
The asshole sitting next to me has boundary issues and a fur lined hat that only Putin could love – he also talks loudly in Russian to his imaginary friends.
How have I lived this long without JeffisHe?
This express train is running far too locally.
Russian weirdo rips his top and snaps his fingers on nipples as orange as Trump’s face.
“Smile Bitch”
His sick room gas mask is the perfect touch and brings everything together in apocalyptic chic.
“Now runaway.”
His stripey pants replacement smells better but transmits plague as if it’s a rebel yell reaching across the air waves to stifle, strangle, promise and repeat.
My reviews are honest but petty… street queer deserved better.
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.
