present tense

one thing that happens at a funeral
is that everyone is still using present tense

we go to john's funeral
i am very under dressed
white-haired men in suits,
lucid eyes shining blue
brows furrowed
with the denial of his death
and shock

i approach his smooth-surfaced box
my mind apprised of
nothing but the rise
of the burner's tremendous flame
and how much he taught us

it's really not floating or flying but
actually a slow falling to the ground
only buoyed again
by the immense heat of the torch

no one knows what to talk about
and for lack of acceptance they whisper
about how difficult it will be to liquidate
assets like hot-air balloon envelopes
and baskets, burners and tethers

we bought sig a living plant instead of flowers
we want her to have it, not for anyone else to take it
i am hesitant to tell her because i think it's too ironic
of course she's so far withdrawn now it makes no difference to her

again, a reminder that no one is eternal
and we are constantly decaying, always breaking
even he who seems indestructible can be here one moment
then gone the next

someone will notice his cat outside
wandering, confused at the sight of snow
and have to break a window
to find him motionless
fallen to the floor
not to fly again

15.12.07

one of my earliest memories
is of seeing a candle lit above the shine of the sienna carpet

i know nothing about its purpose or context
it is just something to me--the mystery of a flame
whose heat i've yet to know

it is winter and outside is cold

cold i know
cold is what my fingers felt when
my mommy slammed them in the door
before church because we were in a hurry

i want to feel this flashing fire
who beckons me with its dance
i'm only a baby and i'm still protected

but nothing stopped me from gingerly touching the flame with my fingertips
and i don't remember what happened further than that

bassinet/bussing it

i can remember curling in a tiny ball
covering myself with my sweatshirt as a blanket
in the furthest seat back,
the one with room enough for three

early morning chill before the sunrise
the muffled sound of loading luggage into the bays below
and the engine slowly idling, blowing billows of steam into the air

not quite as romantic as a train, looking back
but to younger me it is a sleepy adventure

i hear conversations whispered against the condensation of the windows
the slow rocking of my cradle
my father's turning the wheel like waves in the ocean

we are squeezing through city streets
buildings' walls decorated with murals, giving us perspective

the destinations aren't unpleasant but
i can't help but want to get back on the bus
to feel rocked back and forth and speed
high above the highway and its dream lights
to feel again at home and in between all at once.

simple hearts

i wish my parents could remember exactly
how it was over thirty one years ago
before they met one another

back in my day
there was no dancing with
the gender i was attracted to the most
no memory of puppy love affirmed
no acknowledgment that what i am is real and powerful

i wish i could show them
the reversal that takes place
no touch that makes sense
always wondering: mine or hers? and it doesn't matter anyway
public affection taboo most everywhere
never attracted enough, becoming too afraid
and too proud--not enough of a child anymore
to take foolish chances. instead all i know is responsibility and posture
it's not okay to make mistakes

directing it outward
quarter-folded newspaper facebook announcements
and emails with retro pearl engagement ring photos attached

it becomes okay not to respond
because i'm unapologetically gay and of course i have amazing clothes and friends
i write okay things sometimes; am smart and talented, have scathing wit
(sure i can be a bit bitchy but its endearing), and a fair amount of unfulfilling sex--
all just like i'm supposed to.

i'm in my world and you're in yours.
.:i want to explore a new one:.
so have your relationships, find someone,
.:one where we don't have to be against "normalcy":.
get married, have children.
.:call me a minimalist but i just want:.
see if i care. i'm not fucking jealous.

.:simple hearts, like what you've shown me all my life

everyday
moments
of mundane happiness and frustration:.

touch

it's funny how little things can affect you
like smooth fingers running through your hair
or a hand gripping your shoulder
or a clumsy kiss on the stairs

before i know it, ronnie's on my mind
more often than i like
cigarettes burning holes in my concentration
but it's not really him, anyway,
it's just
the kiss

"i have never wanted to kiss you"

we are bound from
nothing but the closeness
my stomach feels against his
i try to tell john the truth of my feelings for him
i am so direct i surprise myself into doubt
wondering if my words are really my heart
they sound too good to be

really, every moment i am touched
i deliberately memorize:

the way my lips graze ryan's ear

as we hug for the first time

jeff's hands tentatively rubbing
my shoulders, quickly letting go

wondering how our bodies contain
such immense talent when i embrace alice

kathleen's maternal touch that draws
her complaint and makes her responsible

holding greg's hand, knowing his fingers
discovered neil's body but that they won't love him

douglass anne wants me to be physically closer to her
i am afraid to let her
because i see myself and i
sense familiar thoughts of possession and jealousy
i know the power of even the most foreign hands, and necks, and shoulders
i know what sway touches, kisses, and embraces have over me

and i don't want that power over her or any girl

but if i'm going to deny her
then i have to at least understand myself
and not want to ask it of john or neil or jeff or greg or ronnie
or anyone

the dedication

i don't know why but i'd been thinking
i would give this to someone--the person who
loved me completely. my partner.
my other half. the one who would fill the rest of my days
in sickness and in health till death do us part, or something.
it wouldn't have even needed to be that important,
just a person i felt was right. i would almost given it away easily, i'm afraid.

but you drew me
out of the lines of your own
ten-year existence without me
you called me down into being and
loved me so hard that sometimes i couldn't even see it
and let me go--probably the most important and
most difficult job a parent has to do. so i decided that
i wanted you to have it instead. it's my heart
scribbled out for you to decode, even though a part of me knows
there will be no need.

so i wanted to show you that i'm grateful, and even though actions speak
louder than words, let these tell you how much i love you
and how much i appreciate your presence.

gifts for an opening

it started tonight with the glasses
elegant champagne flutes whose thin stems
play with the light. sandblasted
with our show's title
which in a few years might confuse me
for a moment until i stop
and remember

second, a rose
charged with an aura of such sincere thanks
this gift is more feeling than substance
it touched me
for once.

there are hugs--the tangible grasp of another body
whose warmth helps ground you in the moment that is already slipping by
now no matter how long i hold on i always feel like it's not long enough. but
at least i'm glad i can finally recognize my need for it, and
i'm learning to understand the gift
those who want to touch me are trying to give.

how do we hold onto such fleeting and happy moments?
sometimes we compare precious moments to draining grains of sand in an hourglass
but i think it's even less tangible; more like a pleasant breeze that flutters past
silently playing with wisps of hair at your temples and making you
wonder if something has even passed at all.

21.10.07

tonight i know again how ineffective we all are
and how little we can actually touch positively.
how much we think we do from a distance
to look closer is to see the
details of people's real pain
and real danger
cracking systems and motionless bureaucracy
seem to do nothing to help that;
an hour to go two and a half blocks.

pens scribble words of supposed release upon forms piling up
like dead leaves in an er waiting room where
the sense of stagnation becomes overwhelming

why are you here?
because they brought me here.
what hurts?
nothing.
so why are you here?

you trip and fall in the orange light of the sidewalk and throw up. so you have to go to the hospital.
it doesn't matter what's best. it only matters that we follow the rules;
rules made from so far above us no one can see their actual result,
only measured in statistics. and so hypocritical its infuriating.
it's for your own good. and we've helped a lot of people.
is it because you're trying to show us how dangerous it is to get really drunk?
how much we really need hospital care after vomiting gracelessly in the bushes?
hospital care being to wait in the waiting room.

it is the emergency room, right?
i guess they meant emergency in plant time
because everything moves so slow
you can't
even see it
moving

what i don't understand
is why alcohol is held up as something distinctly
adult; for an elite group of "responsibles"--
who aren't even, half the time--
and why children expected in all other
respects to act like adults
are judged
and punished harshly
only for emulating what they see
as something grown up.

senioritis

october is a pregnant month.
i hate being this busy, and i love being this busy.
maybe it'll give birth to something interesting.

yesterday i sent two text messages of apology,
if only because we are, as usual, all stressed
beyond our means and the last thing
we need is to be angry with one another.

sarah told me she wants just to go home
for being broken--
it reminds me that almost everything
is about momentum
her words put a few more things into perspective.
i still think john/matt are lucky for having one another.
and i think they get it.

but no matter how much something is worth holding onto
sometimes it slips from your grasp

i don't want to do these things anymore
nothing is more mundane than work that transcends
moments

billy writes them and i consume the pages like the angsty
teen i am inside. i would care about nothing
except for to want my soy chai latte
bought with negative gworld dollars,

to close my eyes, the blue wind fluttering my eyelashes
listening to voices talking about "important" things
and hearing my phone ring
canned heat, voice on the other side
making me smile and
punctuating another moment that is
both and neither happy and sad

14.10.07 / mowing

i remember the smell of grass being mown
as tiny droplets of rain began to fall
three mowers make for short work
but they weren't fast enough and
wet grass is hard to cut

i was ignoring the mowing;
somewhere else
flailing like something magical
thinking we could all fly if we
moved fast enough and wished it

the darkening wood of the deck
like a spell becomes something dangerous
i don't know what's happening but
i'm under the benches and sprawling
through the air
buzz of mowers suspending me

is this what flying--
crash to the ground
the buzzing more intense
no pain, just hurt inside
tears mingle with the rain
...is like?

one mower stops
arms lift me and hold me up
to the sky
i cried even harder because
it wouldn't take me

taste of earth and blood
this is our reality--
wet and hard
and humming with ignorance.

piano lesson

today Frank was proud of me
because i had practiced hard on the haydn

i didn't tell him that
what he'd said last week:
you'll never have more time to
practice than right now

scared me to death
because i secretly know it's true
and i'm quickly realizing
how little i might leave here with,
like everyone

we had the lesson in a practice room
afterwards he had something for me
it was debussy
des pas sur la neige
la cathédrale engloutie
twenty black and white treasure maps

frustration against ivory keys
leads me to the treasure's recreation
subtle, haunting beauty

dream boy

in my dream you were behind me
gripping me violently and growling in my ear
licking my neck and kissing me

the force of your kiss propelled us
through a hallway, twilight air grinning
as i felt the burn of your torso against mine

even though i liked it at first
your tongue soon became something
alarming, boring into my skull

trying to push you off
why are you doing this
in front of everyone?

a circle of chairs and
blank, parental faces looking up at us
two empty, one for you and one for me

i think am scratching and hitting you
getting nowhere with my blows
i feel no difference between pleasure
and pain

as you cling tighter and tighter,
coming into me
soon unable to tell whether it's me or you who won't let go.

29.9.07

tonight i wish there were some way to decorate my body. i'm burning with the energy to inscribe words and other glyphs over my toes and knuckles and neck.

the tongue of a paintbrush could connect my moles, freckles, scars, scabs, and wounds, roughly licking my skin until it glowed pink underneath wet new designs. i am afraid i can count the nights i will feel like this on only one hand.

where are you now, when i need you to help me? where were you before?
tonguing my flesh until i am one with the writing on my skin, i call northward and westward on the wind

i convince myself that i am accepting of impermanence if only because it may be remembered in inscription.

28.9.07

at first i thought i didn't like you.
(maybe because you seemed too much like me)
i was just a new way of regarding the name
there have been a hell of a lot of "cory's" lately.

but it's funny how sometimes you just have
to drink a few half-glasses
of water, and listen to someone talking
and that's what it takes to calm down.

i'm reading this book of poems right now.
i'm not sure how i feel about them -- i don't
know if i can believe the speakers... but
the first one was good. it was about
smoking, and after i read it i
smoked my first cigarette.

gemini

everything i see is a duality
kind of like how i wanted to hate you,
how i wanted to love you.
my nature was to do neither
and both

there has been a lot of disappearing lately
dogs into dust and men into water
solidity giving way to
a swirling whirlpool of ceaseless future-tide.

it angers me how much you knew
seemingly without knowing anything
and yet i find that was what made you special.
that was what lifted my hand for you
on the friday before you left. i think
maybe it was what lifted all of our hands.

you are not the first, not the last
in a long line of those with whom
i won't have enough time.

and it is fitting but it pains me--and all at once
brings me a weird pleasure--that i could miss
really saying goodbye for something
so simple and mundane
as washing my hands.

metal frame

now for an outline
this is the turning curve of
the wheels of a bicycle,

their spokes a spider's
web of late-night conversations,
intense eye contact
a quickening heartbeat
and my favorite, the
chest rising and falling.
cool air washing warm skin.

on to the blue metal frame
yolk of handlebars
that holds up nimble,
burning muscle with ease.
admired for the strength
it has to do so

across the circle
to where he walks the bike
like a woman on his arm,
slender and elegant

all he needs yet is a tuxedo
and a clear cocktail;

every one an apparition
to everyone but me

7286499202

first an itch and i must wait
the heat is too heavy to wait
it crushes eggs in the mulch,
half-grown bird bodies flowing out

next a shoelace snake
my gaze sliding and wet with humidity
/humility
running past; press it off
discs of his nipples oscillating evenly

third a look of disdain
acquired
opening the door--
instead turns the lock upside-down
face explodes with fluid
dying to escape

we are the white-hot sphere.

twenty-first

today
is my twenty-first birthday.

some people are asking me
what i want. what do i want?
i say, i don’t want anything.
i make up something
funny to distract them and change the subject.

there are a lot of real
things i could want. like to just
stop watching. i could want my dog back, who
silently listened to everything i ever said
and never spoke a word. i could say i wanted
nothing but for my boy’s chest behind my back
rising and falling rhythmically to the nervous beat
of my heart.

i could say i needed the misty
irish landscape and the friends who came with it
back, or i could remind myself that i don’t
want strangers anymore. then again,
i could say that i want only sex, or money,
or video games, or clothes.

but i don’t want any of that. not really. not at all. i might pretend
that having any one of those things on my birthday
would make me able to stop wondering, stop thinking,
and quell my confusion
for more than just a few weeks or days at a time.

instead, i say nothing. it’s not worth it to explain
how much of something else i really want, especially when i’m certain
i cannot have all of it. i am ashamed
because i want to know, understand,
and possess too many things.
i am selfish and i am jealous.
i’ve been trying to convince
everyone of all of that for
so long now.
why does it surprise you when i am so?
is it because you think
you see glimpses
of another me within?

i haven't had enough to drink yet.

but there are some nights--
with painted nails and pounded piano
--that remind me, and then
i think i see
them, too, sometimes.

7.6.07

well, sometimes we just come to expect things
and all the blue-grey nights aren't worthless.

i just wanted to continue to feel like you wanted me
and it wasn't just the alcohol. i remember asking
how drunk are you? and you saying you weren't.
and that you wouldn't do something
you didn't want to. i made you promise that you wouldn't just
get off and leave. you peered back at me and in the
slits of light i saw only what i wanted to see. or maybe we both did.

my favorite part was when you told me,
you have a comfortable body and a comfortable bed.
i don't know about my body but
i believe you about the bed. i should have known, though,
when you just kept telling me how funny i was.
as i said before i just liked
listening to you breathe, even if it did make me nervous.

you stayed only as long as you had to--thanks for trying, at least.
more studying the next morning. it was light in the room then and in my mouth
i tasted what i decided to believe was hope, or maybe
it was just leftover alcohol
from yours.

i'd share the name with you, if i could
i can't help but feel estranged from it
like it's not really mine anymore. like many things,
i might have outgrown it. i wish i didn't feel
you are taking something from me but one of us shouldn't
have it because i still want more from you.

it's hard not to think about you
and it's hard not to
take it all so very personally
because when i call to myself
the only way i know how,
you come with me.

adriatico

here,
all must let something out into the adriatic.

when we travel,
there are bags and cases
wherein we stuff pieces of the landscape and take them away with us.

we sleep, knowing and trusting that the capsules will transport our memories safely home.
some are made and taken in photographs,
glowing screens and lightning flashes
that capture thunderstorms in megapixels.

how many are involuntary? burned into memory instead under the clear water;
moments of entropy when some remove clothes to let it penetrate.
other slash their feet and bleed,
crimson clouds billowing into the depths.

all must let something out into the adriatic.
and all must exchange it for a memory.

soliloquy

i remember you
you were there with me the first time
i sat on a shag carpet

was that the night
alexandra spoke
of fondue
and failed pregnancies?

or was it later
when we all clung
to the white whale
made of fabric,
afraid to let go

i remember you
under florescent light
feeling your chest move
breathing behind me

watching a beautiful film
whose characters exist
even less so than usual

finding your heart
finding my heart
we never did, not quite

we never could
in the fluid of that present
and now i know
that you wouldn’t have
wanted to because
i was your first and last.

again, i think,
it is all a matter of convenience

i know that doesn’t mean we felt nothing
and it's fine. but

i remember you
hair moist and dark and shining
turning away from me
like nothing could be easier

maybe you don’t
or won’t
remember me

but i remember you

halogen

outside, it is burning yellow and orange
on the streets

tomorrow--later today
we will think/watch/cry about sex
and how it is love, or may be

and we will
disallow the touch
because that's what i think you want.
it's what i think i want

i have found that
strangers somehow
are better, always

and i wonder
if this time there will be a golden lion
shining from your foreigner's chest.

as for tonight,
i will speak to the vision
who became a reality
alarmingly enough

in a ying yang verse
i am told to be
true to my feelings, always
from the start

but, like you,
i will hide them
in merely cryptic
verses

grease smothered keys
shine with
the message

barely hidden
at all

i will make you a song

but i won't write it down
--they are spells--
i will sing it to you
but you won't ever hear it

i will make you a song
about that which you face
alone, above all

and i will take your old love
that which hurts you so much
of which you can't let go

and i will make it into
something new
something sung

giraffe

but it's all just writing, writing, writing
and it does nothing

text sent to an invisible audience
who may only respond with more text


if i can draw my feelings out onto the screen
with the words i write
then i believe i won't have to feel anything anymore
which is what i convince myself i want
what i convince myself is best
for everyone

constantly pulling myself in two directions
unable to move in the direction i most desire
(i need more help than i get)

but really no need for any pulling
because we feel everything, don't we?
don't we.

but the only way to stay proud, rigid,
and neither happy nor sad
(but mostly sad)
is to pretend that
i don't.

then don't make us feel like we did

they try, they try, they try.
all try to touch me.
none can reach through.

i try, too. from the other end.
but i don't try hard enough.
and only coming halfway makes for very bad parties.

once i learned to touch through all the way
i found the way in ireland with you.

all is my fault, and i know it.
i don't know why but
i don't want it to be different or it would be.
it is easiest to turn off.

i am really just afraid of the change.
and yet i long for it with everything i have.
i am always fighting myself
and that is what begins again to define me
and lock me into mood-less stasis.

i feel so constrained; it is only from within myself.
everything is about control, and willpower, and the sustenance of posture.
and the preservation of a baseless image.
an unpleasant one.
a lonely one.

above all
a lonely one.

can't sleep

four of us
standing on a hill
we watch the water far below

two step forward
into the abyss

two are left
fondling the edges of their coatsleeves



four of us
watching from the dark
wishing to enter the fray

two step forward
into the abyss

two are left
fondling the rocks of the cave



four of us
kissing in the storm
burning to let it all go

two move forward
into the abyss

two are left
fondling themselves

for their fingertips do not reach the other's.