“Everything is important,” he said.
“Blood research is important. Film is important.
Everything is important.
A job at McDonald’s is important.”
He was big from the waist up, what they call
Barrel-chested. In my arms, he felt fleshy.
We were talking, afterwards.
There was no polite chitchat
When he walked into my living room,
Total stranger from the Internet. There were only postures,
Approximating the fantasy, the intentions.
He wanted to kiss me right away. Normally, this would be fine,
I’m a kisser. My heart sank with a single glance,
Not really my type. Too big, Not handsome.
He looked ridiculous in his soccer kit, white and blue.
I’ve lived my life on first impressions.
His lips were big, I thought, Middle Eastern.
As I tilted his head onto my shoulder,
I noticed a balding area sneaking up on the mass of curly fur.
I didn’t want to kiss him.
Before it was over in the bedroom, I did.
He was French of Greek extraction, he said.
Moved from Nice to L.A. 28 years ago.
A biologist with a taste for spanking.
He told me how it began; only I know it wasn’t
how it really began, Not really.
I’m thinking, French daddy did some spanking.
The cool blue Mediterranean lapped the shore.
More than once, I suppose.
His research was about blood disorders.
When he told me, I said, “That’s important.”
6/2/07
INVALID
I understand the psychology of the sick and the infirm:
You conserve the energy you have.
Start receding, incident by incident, day by day.
Isolate, pull back, push away, stay inside, save, conserve, preserve, regress, atrophy, die.
It’s counter intuitive, but logical.
I feel bad, so let me feel worse.
At the center of that choice is the evaporation of hope,
The elimination of faith.
I no longer believe, so I make no effort.
I don’t see it this way in the middle of the choice, this is the curse.
Courage is the vision to see more choices.
Willingness to select one without knowing the outcome.
Allowing hope and faith to leech away
Tells me that courage has already fled.
The warrior lives a courageous life in each moment.
He has learned where to place his faith and hope.
I let you see the mask, never beneath it.
It’s stage business so that you will not watch the rest.
The ugly part, the real part, me.
I am relying upon technique, I am lying to your face.
I am watching myself do it.
You can never see the terror,
Pulling me from the sweetness and victory of each night’s dream
Into the daily waking life of masquerade and impersonation.
Of course there is no real need to act.
There is no monster hiding beneath the mask.
There is only habit.
Pathetic repetition of tiresome ritual, pain and avoidance.
How can the warrior go into battle
Without the armor and the faceplate?
Would not the soldiers of the enemy find my heart without it?
If the heart is pierced,
Will I bleed to death?
You conserve the energy you have.
Start receding, incident by incident, day by day.
Isolate, pull back, push away, stay inside, save, conserve, preserve, regress, atrophy, die.
It’s counter intuitive, but logical.
I feel bad, so let me feel worse.
At the center of that choice is the evaporation of hope,
The elimination of faith.
I no longer believe, so I make no effort.
I don’t see it this way in the middle of the choice, this is the curse.
Courage is the vision to see more choices.
Willingness to select one without knowing the outcome.
Allowing hope and faith to leech away
Tells me that courage has already fled.
The warrior lives a courageous life in each moment.
He has learned where to place his faith and hope.
I let you see the mask, never beneath it.
It’s stage business so that you will not watch the rest.
The ugly part, the real part, me.
I am relying upon technique, I am lying to your face.
I am watching myself do it.
You can never see the terror,
Pulling me from the sweetness and victory of each night’s dream
Into the daily waking life of masquerade and impersonation.
Of course there is no real need to act.
There is no monster hiding beneath the mask.
There is only habit.
Pathetic repetition of tiresome ritual, pain and avoidance.
How can the warrior go into battle
Without the armor and the faceplate?
Would not the soldiers of the enemy find my heart without it?
If the heart is pierced,
Will I bleed to death?
DESIRE
It was our third viewing of “Streetcar.”
Funny, even though I was captivated
I knew something was wrong.
Way before the credits spun.
He bolted out of the theatre ahead of me.
Glare from the marquee lights hurt my eyes.
I watched his back as he stepped off the curb.
Not turning, not waiting.
I could still feel Brando inside,
Yelling to Stella in my head.
Hey, wait up. I trotted,
but he still didn’t turn around.
I thought we were going for a drink.
He stepped into street. Car swerved.
I grabbed the plaid sleeve, his face distorted,
Lips closed and tight, hard like stone.
Only a metallic taste in my mouth, no spit.
His eyes flashed. He hates me, I thought.
He pushed my hand away,
I fisted the air between us.
Don’t you dare walk away from me.
The kiss of his nose against my knuckles
Finished before the cracking sound hit my ears.
The wounded yelp of the stunned beast.
Everywhere was red.
Animal sounds were mine now.
Knees to pavement, I cried out.
I told you not to walk away, baby.
Funny, even though I was captivated
I knew something was wrong.
Way before the credits spun.
He bolted out of the theatre ahead of me.
Glare from the marquee lights hurt my eyes.
I watched his back as he stepped off the curb.
Not turning, not waiting.
I could still feel Brando inside,
Yelling to Stella in my head.
Hey, wait up. I trotted,
but he still didn’t turn around.
I thought we were going for a drink.
He stepped into street. Car swerved.
I grabbed the plaid sleeve, his face distorted,
Lips closed and tight, hard like stone.
Only a metallic taste in my mouth, no spit.
His eyes flashed. He hates me, I thought.
He pushed my hand away,
I fisted the air between us.
Don’t you dare walk away from me.
The kiss of his nose against my knuckles
Finished before the cracking sound hit my ears.
The wounded yelp of the stunned beast.
Everywhere was red.
Animal sounds were mine now.
Knees to pavement, I cried out.
I told you not to walk away, baby.
CACTUS BLOOM
The cactus bloomed last night.
Three inches across, cream color at the center,
Pale pink tendrils swimming in iridescence.
Fingers of green grasped the whole thing, offering it up to the moonlight as a sacrifice.
The flower will die before the sun does today.
It will shrivel and dry, will fall off and leave a lump.
I brought the huge plant home one Saturday
And even while potting it, I overlooked the buds,
Artichoke ornaments hung on an ugly, prickly tree.
Later, showered and shiny clean,
A single bloody slice of red flesh on the rusted grill,
I felt it happen, a visual slap, a quickening of the heartbeat: inexpressible beauty. Three blooms had sprouted
Where only buds had been two hours before.
The stamen of one of the blooms jiggled, a bee
Taking the nectar as a blessing on this singular night.
Chris wanted to talk about death, but he couldn’t,
Only about the end of life, which was far worse,
The shriveling, the pain.
If only his cycle was ordained as precisely
As the cactus blossom’s, never lasting
more than a day. It’s the uncertainty that terrifies,
You’d think the terminally ill could at least
Get a reliable schedule.
AIDS had robbed him of the illusions
of the young and the foolish.
He knew he would die, just not when.
No convenient sun or moon provided a final tidy ending.
Instead, each day a coda of suffering.
In its prelude to release,
A dying cactus bloom becomes all stink and no perfume,
A life without reward,
Except perhaps for the moments
When beauty slaps and helps us to forget.
Three inches across, cream color at the center,
Pale pink tendrils swimming in iridescence.
Fingers of green grasped the whole thing, offering it up to the moonlight as a sacrifice.
The flower will die before the sun does today.
It will shrivel and dry, will fall off and leave a lump.
I brought the huge plant home one Saturday
And even while potting it, I overlooked the buds,
Artichoke ornaments hung on an ugly, prickly tree.
Later, showered and shiny clean,
A single bloody slice of red flesh on the rusted grill,
I felt it happen, a visual slap, a quickening of the heartbeat: inexpressible beauty. Three blooms had sprouted
Where only buds had been two hours before.
The stamen of one of the blooms jiggled, a bee
Taking the nectar as a blessing on this singular night.
Chris wanted to talk about death, but he couldn’t,
Only about the end of life, which was far worse,
The shriveling, the pain.
If only his cycle was ordained as precisely
As the cactus blossom’s, never lasting
more than a day. It’s the uncertainty that terrifies,
You’d think the terminally ill could at least
Get a reliable schedule.
AIDS had robbed him of the illusions
of the young and the foolish.
He knew he would die, just not when.
No convenient sun or moon provided a final tidy ending.
Instead, each day a coda of suffering.
In its prelude to release,
A dying cactus bloom becomes all stink and no perfume,
A life without reward,
Except perhaps for the moments
When beauty slaps and helps us to forget.
HUMOR
Those passed-down, much-loved one-liners
Can trigger something:
“You want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,”
One guy said at yesterday’s meeting.
Reminded me of: “God really has a good sense of humor.”
Who was it made that joke
about me and my brother?
A line set up to buy some distance from the pain.
Vince married Vicky, the opposite of first wife Sandy,
Tall, beautiful Connecticut engineer with Russian & Chinese,
Staying up late in pajamas with Gunter Grass and J.D. Salinger
That first Christmas visit.
Vicky is short, plump, a California dropout
Working in a bank, ready to produce the Christian
Nuclear family he seemed to want, seemed to need.
Vicky #1.
Not much like Nick, who traveled to D.C. to change the world,
Finding more in the bedroom than in the headlines.
More than just who he fucked.
A resignation from the white picket fence world.
New rules to replace the ones from the books he kept reading.
He slept with a thousand men, and one woman.
He thought she was a lesbian, so it was OK.
Vicky #2.
This is the part where the joke comes in, so be careful.
Straight brother and Vicky #1 pray for kids.
God says nope, so they start adopting like crazy.
Carry-out family, baby acquisition.
One right after the other. Four girls.
Gay brother and Vicky #2 hide their lust.
The other queers see no gay gunplay,
They fucked like crazy behind closed doors.
Of course it was doomed. He really was gay, she wasn’t.
It was after they broke up the last time
That she skipped her period.
And much, much later
That she told him about the abortion.
I think it was me who made the joke.
Can trigger something:
“You want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,”
One guy said at yesterday’s meeting.
Reminded me of: “God really has a good sense of humor.”
Who was it made that joke
about me and my brother?
A line set up to buy some distance from the pain.
Vince married Vicky, the opposite of first wife Sandy,
Tall, beautiful Connecticut engineer with Russian & Chinese,
Staying up late in pajamas with Gunter Grass and J.D. Salinger
That first Christmas visit.
Vicky is short, plump, a California dropout
Working in a bank, ready to produce the Christian
Nuclear family he seemed to want, seemed to need.
Vicky #1.
Not much like Nick, who traveled to D.C. to change the world,
Finding more in the bedroom than in the headlines.
More than just who he fucked.
A resignation from the white picket fence world.
New rules to replace the ones from the books he kept reading.
He slept with a thousand men, and one woman.
He thought she was a lesbian, so it was OK.
Vicky #2.
This is the part where the joke comes in, so be careful.
Straight brother and Vicky #1 pray for kids.
God says nope, so they start adopting like crazy.
Carry-out family, baby acquisition.
One right after the other. Four girls.
Gay brother and Vicky #2 hide their lust.
The other queers see no gay gunplay,
They fucked like crazy behind closed doors.
Of course it was doomed. He really was gay, she wasn’t.
It was after they broke up the last time
That she skipped her period.
And much, much later
That she told him about the abortion.
I think it was me who made the joke.
MURDER
Eight years ago this month,
Richard died. Heaving heavy body up the steps of a bus
out in the San Gabriel Valley.
Heart attack, it was official, there was an autopsy.
Sure, overweight, with high blood pressure.
And he did insist upon the busses.
To save money. To identify with the poor.
A gesture of eccentricity,
like the dyed orange Mohawk that one year.
Like the vest he had made out of the splashy red obi
I brought back from Tokyo.
Still, I think it was the AIDS drugs that stopped his heart.
The drugs and the panic:
Sero-conversion past his fifth decade.
After everything else, the irony was not lost.
It was one of three times we cried together, the night he told me.
Really cried, I mean,
Like when my moonshadow mama died.
And when I went into rehab.
“Just a Cholo I picked up at Elysian Park.
I let him fuck me bare.” Normally,
I would have joked, you know:
“Good sex, at least?”
The smell of shame sealed my mouth shut.
In the litter of paper, piles of it,
He found a single article.
A new clinical trial.
Aggressive experimental drugs.
A reverse sero-conversion, back from positive.
Administer immediately upon infection.
It was just like him, fucking dilettante.
The drugs could save him, but the side effects were murder.
That’s what I think.
Richard died. Heaving heavy body up the steps of a bus
out in the San Gabriel Valley.
Heart attack, it was official, there was an autopsy.
Sure, overweight, with high blood pressure.
And he did insist upon the busses.
To save money. To identify with the poor.
A gesture of eccentricity,
like the dyed orange Mohawk that one year.
Like the vest he had made out of the splashy red obi
I brought back from Tokyo.
Still, I think it was the AIDS drugs that stopped his heart.
The drugs and the panic:
Sero-conversion past his fifth decade.
After everything else, the irony was not lost.
It was one of three times we cried together, the night he told me.
Really cried, I mean,
Like when my moonshadow mama died.
And when I went into rehab.
“Just a Cholo I picked up at Elysian Park.
I let him fuck me bare.” Normally,
I would have joked, you know:
“Good sex, at least?”
The smell of shame sealed my mouth shut.
In the litter of paper, piles of it,
He found a single article.
A new clinical trial.
Aggressive experimental drugs.
A reverse sero-conversion, back from positive.
Administer immediately upon infection.
It was just like him, fucking dilettante.
The drugs could save him, but the side effects were murder.
That’s what I think.
STINKY
The tea tree oil smell, loamy and fetid, invaded my nostrils,
A sharp bite lingering, even after I put on my right shoe.
Leather --- you’d think it would be heavy enough
To mask a tiny blob of oil, a squirt to fight the fungi whose colony would, if left unchecked, eventually eliminate my toenail.
The shoes always go on last,
Sometimes, a sock-and-a-shoe, left; a sock-and-a-shoe, right.
Sometimes, sock-sock-shoe-shoe.
But always first, the shirt, then the pants, the belt, hopefully,
And only then, the socks & shoes.
Order is important to me.
I wanted to be smellier in the locker rooms of my youth,
Proof that I was part of the tribe
that clashed in the epic games of passage
that I knew would signify my manhood.
Without the stink, without the games,
What was I but a kid in a shower, no reason to soap up?
Nothing to bring under the smothering protection
of the females beyond the battlefield, which admitted
Only boys, only men, only warriors.
Without sports, I did not get unruly, savage, angry, ferocious, intentional or manly. Without any of the stink,
I never learned to clean up.
Nor could I veer back along the trajectory
of life’s ever-present pendulum, a swing back to order,
To tidiness, to non-savagery, to domestication:
A need to yearn for the quiet sanctuary of home, of security, finding an excuse to continue being a warrior.
Instead, a descent into the stinkier precincts of outlaw bad boy life. Unapproved, hidden from those doing the approving.
A therapeutic wallow in life’s mud,
Regression into the savage, primitive.
Man getting filthy, being filthy.
I enter the house late, sweat flowing, bonded with clods of earth, dustings of bat guano and other secret smelly primal odors,
My own at the pits and the crotch and the breath.
I emerge from a randy romp with a total stranger,
Sports fuck and performance sex,
Conducting an olfactory symphony of erotic stink
That is only possible through complete surrender to pleasure.
All the while, a coiling spring, inside a passive man boy,
Tightening ever so slowly, year by year,
Until a microscopic line is crossed, a coil wound too tight,
A snap, a very evident snap, a public snap that unleashes
the pendulum’s governor,
Setting off the wild careening, back and forth,
A great wind that sweeps away all smells and evidence of manhood, both cloistered and unwashed.
And leaves a smooth, clean natural surface
Upon which to build a new life that,
In it’s own way, brings the warrior into the house, never to hide again,
A love warrior who lives inside every moment,
who never has to be ashamed again.
A sharp bite lingering, even after I put on my right shoe.
Leather --- you’d think it would be heavy enough
To mask a tiny blob of oil, a squirt to fight the fungi whose colony would, if left unchecked, eventually eliminate my toenail.
The shoes always go on last,
Sometimes, a sock-and-a-shoe, left; a sock-and-a-shoe, right.
Sometimes, sock-sock-shoe-shoe.
But always first, the shirt, then the pants, the belt, hopefully,
And only then, the socks & shoes.
Order is important to me.
I wanted to be smellier in the locker rooms of my youth,
Proof that I was part of the tribe
that clashed in the epic games of passage
that I knew would signify my manhood.
Without the stink, without the games,
What was I but a kid in a shower, no reason to soap up?
Nothing to bring under the smothering protection
of the females beyond the battlefield, which admitted
Only boys, only men, only warriors.
Without sports, I did not get unruly, savage, angry, ferocious, intentional or manly. Without any of the stink,
I never learned to clean up.
Nor could I veer back along the trajectory
of life’s ever-present pendulum, a swing back to order,
To tidiness, to non-savagery, to domestication:
A need to yearn for the quiet sanctuary of home, of security, finding an excuse to continue being a warrior.
Instead, a descent into the stinkier precincts of outlaw bad boy life. Unapproved, hidden from those doing the approving.
A therapeutic wallow in life’s mud,
Regression into the savage, primitive.
Man getting filthy, being filthy.
I enter the house late, sweat flowing, bonded with clods of earth, dustings of bat guano and other secret smelly primal odors,
My own at the pits and the crotch and the breath.
I emerge from a randy romp with a total stranger,
Sports fuck and performance sex,
Conducting an olfactory symphony of erotic stink
That is only possible through complete surrender to pleasure.
All the while, a coiling spring, inside a passive man boy,
Tightening ever so slowly, year by year,
Until a microscopic line is crossed, a coil wound too tight,
A snap, a very evident snap, a public snap that unleashes
the pendulum’s governor,
Setting off the wild careening, back and forth,
A great wind that sweeps away all smells and evidence of manhood, both cloistered and unwashed.
And leaves a smooth, clean natural surface
Upon which to build a new life that,
In it’s own way, brings the warrior into the house, never to hide again,
A love warrior who lives inside every moment,
who never has to be ashamed again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
