Tired sleepy eyed transformation awaits. The unconscious cut in line but are more lively than I am and I’m mostly awake!
I’m wearing scruff, no makeup or jewelry.
Halloween may be every day but will be celebrated more than 50 moons from now as I remain here in my complete lack of drag save my Joy Division shirt.
“Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others.”
How much for a cup of coffee?
Just your self respect, as I’m reminded daily of orange shrimp with tiny baby hands and the day I wandered into his seaweed castle aquarium to beg for sustenance.
Being stuck underground in the Heights I should be panicked and pissed about my horribly fucked up Starbucks drink, but my Vitamin Water Whiskey mixture prevents this.
Luna Park in headphones and I chill.
Whiskey rushing through my veins.
Nothing satisfies the bones.
The scrape on my hand was unintentional; one must not fist androids.
Mashup from decade ago (or longer) returns in Times Square.
My hands are blotchy and I thought the food seller bathed in Windex but it’s actually asian hand sanitizer.
The hot random to my right is less than perfect which somehow makes him hotter, though he disappears at Penn Station, undoubtedly reappearing for others as he leans in, kissing my neck as I continue to write, still listening to Justin and Enrique make love to one another.
Time to meet Monica and ease on down the road.
(I’m returning The Wiz, if that isn’t too obvious)
There have, in the past been talented enthusiasts, skilled contortionists, beloved boyfriends and romantic one night stands… but after nearly seven years he knows me; knows more about what happens INSIDE ME than anyone who ever previously came that way.
With the others, skilled as they were, there was always something more; something secret transpiring behind my
ORGASM
CLOSED
EYES
But by now he knows everything he needs to know, which he uses to his advantage, bringing me to my oft contemplated conclusion; he looks at me with his insider’s knowledge and he sees inside what others could not.
The path to my bliss is a code which he has broken; a cypher that my body, my outward appearance could never hope to betray, for all the contradictions therein.
He feeds my desperation with erotic confections, candied pornography, titillatingly told and suggestively supplied.
He says all the right things, evocative, provocative things, pressing all the right buttons, pulling all the right strings, whispering nearly impossible encryption, like an incantation (if not a description); such nectarous wines which some find grotesque as my redolent rhymes at last come undressed.
And there, in the harsh light of spray, as frenzied fantasy is glazed with stud honey, he looks deep into my opened eyes and tells me how much he loves me.
Part II: Sweet Dreams
I sleep like the dead.
A door slams and I am awakened; a scenario which has always made me sad.
Returning to consciousness ALONE is shocking.
Previous waking memory involves being nakedly wrapped in another man’s embrace… he was just here.
My deathly slumber has robbed me of too many farewells.
How do men disentangle themselves from me so easily?
Perhaps when lulled into a false sense of security, I fail to cling effectively?
The most satisfying sexual encounters of my life seem predicated on utter destruction come the merciless light of day.
Perhaps that early sweetness
before such raw transformative encounters have bruised us
is life’s deceptive way of getting us all to take our medicine.
Part III: A Bitter Pill to Swallow
He says he’s been crying all morning; that we’ve not planned this day well.
He wishes we were together.
We are frustrated that my thoughtfulness was unknowingly seemingly thoughtless.
Should have asked for headphones. Should have called when doorslam woke me. Should have moved this appointment but the confusing calendar info has only recently been translated and my therapist has no other window so I take the car he scheduled for me to the appointment he scheduled for me and I hope for the best, swallowing any bitterness by remembering last night’s sugar.
In last night’s sleep the nightmarish visions of not deluded sheep simulate incisions as the blue Nazi glow in The Mountains of Madness melt us like snow and dissolve us to sadness.
In the unrhyming aftermath of implied Aryan birth, nazis are defeated and left for dead: Good riddance to bad rubbish!
And being quintessential explorers and seeing twin pubescent horrors where the rhyming never ceases as our timing falls to pieces.
But what may not be apparent is that I’m the young man in living dead film phallusy who hungers mightily for pleasures only a sleeping captive human audience could love.
I ask myself, if I am truly the protagonist, then how might I also be this quiescent observer? This slumbering host body? How can I be this sleepwalking witness who follows him through long night light hours as he mouths disembodied flesh which I recognize all too easily? How can he be so real as to feed my woolgathering desire when it is I who nurses him through his hungry nightmare adolescence?
I cannot answer HOW or WHY; I can only say that we both know it to be true.
I grasp what I can as I struggle to take it to the waking world.
Stolen movie set arthouse penis is still pissing and cumming on cue.
Mark agrees it must be fake as I swallow.
His earbuds are too loud and though I put up a fight I surrender in the end and allow him his jam session.
Clive Barker is a blue/purple devil in this portrait pictured novel – the eyes really do seem to follow you, don’t they?
The motion comic images relay our illustrated conversation.
Is he the devil or a saint? A demon or a mutant? X-Man or author?
You can feel him pressed up against you, behind you, where his urticating perforating fur penetrates ever pore in pleasurable striation.
Before opening eyes, I wonder is this Mark curved around me or perhaps that blue devil, Clive?
I wake, wrapped in Aaron’s arms, there is love in every scrap of contact…. completion found in our oft referenced flesh and blood puzzle.
His scratchy chest hair pressing firm in the soft of my back.
Without disengaging, I reach for pen and microphone as I set out to capture what languishes inside me, a dream with much meaning which can never truly be reclaimed.
Seeing these men who never find themselves, save in these sacred gay spaces, who often actually lose themselves in the overwhelming tide of acceptance…
That story, often read, was never truly mine; a disconnect, which likely saved my life… but perhaps, although I did the smartest things, memorizing all of the rules to this deathly game of life… perhaps after all that I’ve done (or not) I simply have survivor’s guilt?
I found my Fire Island / Castro, found my Stonewall / found my Eagle, found my Saugatuck and Folsom, found my Pride in my reflection.
In the after wrath of AIDS amidst the slaughter of my peers.
In the aftermath crusades I came of age and faced my fears.
A generation’s gurney closure fighting to be free.
A journey overwriting what my story yearned to be.
Free to live a lonely man; this glut tricked out obsession.
Free to be the homo man; the slut without protection.
Free to be the ones in hell about to hearse to college.
Free to be the ones who fell without the curse of knowledge.
Free to pluck the pain from hearts of seedy sly arrivals.
Free to fuck the pain apart with no need for survival.
Crying baby has yet to learn the lost language of abandonment which must be taught to more than two-thousand changeling children in perverse dollhouse TV replicas of unloving American schoolrooms.
The impossible pressing of flesh that distance provides may well be revelatory but God bless those who are spared such unwanted visions of cursed solitude.
God bless those who are forced by their innocence to endure such disturbances; such nightmarish realities that they may forever struggle to reclaim what has been or soon will be forever stolen from them.
May they survive, prosper, find comfort of some kind in their shared experience, those tear stained imperatives.
