unrevised poem I never sent to him

Hemophilia

for Tim

He was the first Hasidic Jew I had ever laid eyes on.
His fly was open as we walked together toward the park.

I think we are all walking around with our pitiful
flies open. And we are all hemophiliacs

bleeding from it. I can’t stop it. The basement is flooded
with my phone calls to you to say that the peppers were crying here,
the peppers were crying at the co-op today and the world is a mirror.

But no one is on the phone right now; they’ve come down
to the Madison Square Park of a hot summer; they would all like
a little sip of us. You are somewhere among these cottony powerlunches.

You are in sandals, snake in the grass,
belly becoming pillow.

I can’t stop shopping in New York City.
There never was a sale I wouldn’t have bought you at.

The city without you makes me feel Hasidic
and I abstemiously abstain from carving my hand
into a hand for you to hold

but fold it like a block of wood in pocket shroud
until that one day on which we can speak to gentiles.

I’ll clasp your hand on our Bedford Ave.
and ask you to pray—but only if you are you.

And we’ll never be closer.

poem for ("Okay, bye bye now. Good luck with everything in your life!") Cute Tim

VINCENT, (2)

this morning a blimp was blocking 53rd Street
as inexplicable and final as a sigh
when you are about to say why you did sigh
but it is already done and we will never
be happy together again never sure and
I felt if I walked all the way to the Hudson
through the electrical (artificial spring) air
I would not be able to pass I
would not be able to meet you on the other shore
but here you are in a gust of wind with
your bronze turn-out smiling shyly on the velvet
light my depression drifts off into the blue theatre
why did you sigh anyway why did I notice
a sheet flaps in the wind a pillow hits the floor
we are laughing as time collapses around us
on the Palisades-Columbus-Avenue-Love-Bed-Awards


-- Frank O'Hara

melancholycutyououtofmylife

Rain changes to snow.

No cars have come down the street for a few hours.

Listening to "Fuck This...I'm Leaving" by American Analog Set.

Sorry Cute Time. Sorry you had such narrow vision. I don't blame you. But it is why we would never have worked out had you stuck around. We met a few weeks before you moved to NYC. After you left we carried on as lovers. You had such a beautiful body and I loved being inside of you and then holding you in my arms and almost crushing you in kisses. Wrapping you up made me feel wrapped up.

Rain changes to snow.

You would call from a few hours out. Hey, I'm on the train, I'm a couple hours away...can I stay with you tonight? My flight leaves in the morning...it was incredibly passionate.

I can imagine what would have happened had we stuck around in the same town and become boyfriends...banality, middle class existence, bourgeoise, boring, recriminations, acrimony. It worked so well for me. But after a series of emails, a ruthless excision on your part, followed by a 'have a nice life' junior high line and please send me back my hat and delete those naughty photos you took...I'm sorry, but I have no patience for boys with no imagination. Its why we never would have worked out, Cute Tim.

Sorry too: I'm not going to delete those photos.

in this house on ice

oh dear friends i am a little drunk...8 pm in that lull between friday happy hours with coworkers and then the later bar excursions with other friends, sitting in my apartment, inhaling the stench of varnish, windows wide open to the still air and just now on the number four bus my ipod which switches through songs came to 'house on ice' by clap your hands say yeah and i was reminded of the early summer, when i listened to this album and this song in particular a whole hell of a lot as i had just gotten a car and returned from buenos aires a new man several pounds lighter and addicted to camel lights and katie and i would often drive to twin lake and drink maté and lay on the beach among the hippies and in the heat of the summer this song was my anthem and now in the gray dark winter it came to me again half drunk on the number four bus among the neon and overcoats and made me overjoyed or was it the beer.

Hamas in the park

Hamas has scored a stinging political victory that has thrown an already unstable Middle East into complete disarray.

Er something.

I know little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as I am afraid to pick up any book on the subject lest I am inculcated by some sinister ideology.

In that subject, alone among all others, I wish to be ideologieless.

In London, when the writing wasn't going so well, or if I was lonely, or drunk, I would end up in Bloomsbury Square.

From about ten pm until six am it was a bacchanalia.

Summer nights were orgiastic--the men, dozens of them--would undulate in groups among the weak leaves of the battered limes.

One time I stepped into a muddy glen, two sides brush, one side wrought iron that looked out upon a cobbled street of row houses, and a skinny young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, pale in the light, was being attended to, like a prince with a coterie, by men who knelt and kneaded at his penis and neck and lips with gloved hands.

He detached himself from them and found me.

We kissed for a while before he took me away from there.

I can't remember where his flat was--off the Edgware Road I think, somewhere east of there, an area some called Noho, he owned the flat himself.

We fucked in this room that was blindingly bright from arc-sodiums that lit up the square of the council block.

After, I kicked around the books he had stacked on floor in the living room.

He said he went to college in Southwark and was studying Yiddish theatre and performance cultures at the turn of the century.

We began to speak of Jewish culture--he was a Jew.

Members of his family had immigrated to Israel but he was in actor and wanted to make it in London.

"And who are you?" He asked me.

Despite everything that had come before, it was the first point at which he had asked anything about me.

"What's your background?"

"I'm American," I said.

"I know that--but your ethnicity."

"French," I said.

His face fell. "French? You mean--you aren't Arab?"

My left eye winced as it is wont to do. His face fell some more.

I shared the bed with him but we didn't speak much. In the morning, he quickly left me, saying he had important appointments.

That's how I remember it.

Visuals

For those of you who may have downloaded a copy of Treasure Island Media's Plantin' Seed 2 (eponymously named if you indeed call it 'seed,' for it is indeed planted, many times, though I must admit I have never met nor will I ever entertain for dinner any man who calls it 'seed' and blemishes the act of making love by deigning to call it "plantin' seed" nor will I ever allow anyone to "plant" anything on or in me) but were distracted to other corners of the frame during a particular scene you may have missed one character who appears to be enjoying the act of bareback sex whilst adorned with an ankle bracelet. How incongruous, since my understanding was that the bracelet's purpose was to detain criminals under house arrest but apparently there are degrees of limitations that can be opposed, ever-widening spheres in which particular low-level offenders can move, and good for him for negotiating with his corrections officer the luxury of attending filmed bareback sex parties in hotels. Or perhaps he lied and said he was just popping out for some milk and smokes.

To me the image of the bracelet crowds out all others from this film.

It perked me up

Depressed, I found myself driving out to the suburban Monday night orgy.

Wetnesses on the highway gilded behind semis.

Early, I idled in my car in a grocery store parking lot and watched a woman struggle with her groceries.

In my dream I dreamt that I smoked cigarettes again.

I use my car so infrequently and it takes me to such beautiful places--suburbs, grocery stores, an eighteen year old who calls me now too frequently.

I associate cars with sex and cigarettes.

Idling in them gives my cravings and erections.

The orgy took place in a darkened room.

One young man, in baggy cargo pants and shirt, buzzcut, stunk of smokes, gothic lettering on his back, always found me. I found it so comforting, to be stuffed full of him.

On my way home I sang to Dolly Parton songs, loudly, and the billows of snow confused me and blinded the road ahead.

I arrived home, and once showered, felt much better.

Veux-tu?

We went to high school together--I'll call him Saul. I only went to his house once. He lived out in the woods in a small white house set in a nicely manicured lawn with white pebble gardens. Outside his bedroom window was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Saul was Catholic and wore a cross of St. Christopher around his neck. I found this out in Quebec City in June after my junior year. We were in the French club together and had taken a trip to Quebec City for a week to practice our French. We were staying at Lavalle University dorms. The real students had departed.

During the days we were free to come and go as wel pleased, taking the city buses into the old part of town (or, if we were brave, out to suburban shopping malls, where no one spoke English). Most of us chose to spend the days out of the dorms, because they were sweltering.

Saul and I were friends, good friends. I think we had spent the day together in town but had returned to the dorms before everyone else. We were alone in his dorm room and he took of his shirt. He told me what the medallion meant.

Saul and I had a game we used to play. It was a variation of the 'Do You Trust Me' game that some of his played in junior high. You put your hand on a girl's knee and said, "do you trust me?" If she said yes, you moved your hand a fraction of a inch higher. Same question. Another affirmative, and you inched up and up until she giggled and bucked your hand off. Saul and would play the same game, only after two or three rounds one of his would suddenly lunge for the other's crotch and give it a good shake, like a dog's jaw tugging on a rope.

That's the game we played, only it went farther. I kept my hand on his crotch and he let it sit there for seconds upon seconds.

Each second another drop of sweat.

Eventually we bucked against each other, his bare chest against me. I can close my eyes and see the brown freckles, the pendulum of St. Christopher beating between us.

Nothing else happened. The moment was dilluted and then trickled away. We returned home.

It was the end of our senior year when the next development occured. Again, it happened rather quickly during a heated performance of our Do You Trust Me game. This time we were in my parents' minivan and I was driving us to a friend's house. There was a lot of crotch-grabbing along the highway. Finally, I pulled over. I was going to ask the question.

"Saul, can I ask you something? Are you gay?"

"Yes," he said, very, very quietly.

"YOU ARE?" I said loudly and quickly, so shocked and surprised and so pleasaed.

"Nah," he said, retreating. "Far from it."

I told him I was bisexual, that it was okay if he was, etc. Nothing happened. He wouldn't budge. He wouldnt' go there again. I asked if he wanted to go to the elementary school and hang out on the dark playground equipment. We wouldn't need to join our friends. We could just be alone. No, he didn't want that.

A lot pivots on that moment for me, and also very little. I was enamoured of Saul. I admired him, his sweetness, his sensitive masculinity. He needed glasses. In a way he was a Jack Twist. I was in love with him. I moved away to go to college and Saul struggled at the local community college, eventually dropping out to work full time in the meat department of a grocery store. I have never gone back to see him although I know exactly where he would be. When I kissed the suburban boy the other night, the lips immediately made me think of Saul's, as though every kiss I seek out is a search for his.

Suburbia

Yesterday I was dreaming of whales in the Thames. Today I learned it has died.

Yesterday I drove out to the suburbs to have sex. I rarely drive out of the center of the city--when I do I am entranced by the long lines of red tail lights, the endless sound walls, the outposts of fast food boxes blazing at the onramps.

I had been talking to this 18 year old on Manhunt and he thought I was sexy--this is the high school kid from an earlier post. He lives in a shitty townhome with his dad; they have a giant big screen t.v. and little else of value, rummage sale purchases, mis-matched furniture. One of dad's friends, a recently divorced dude, lives in the basement. The guy is a senior and his dad teaches high school hockey and he was out at a game so we had a few hours.

When I met him I realized he only had a few more years of cuteness in him. He had reddish hair and blond eyebrows that became invisible in certain light and at particular angles. He had a cute round face, taut, but as soon as the slack starts showing he'll be done for. We started fooling around. He was a bit chubby but underneath it was hard muscle and a lot of it.

After we fucked we laid around and he put his hand in my chest hair and told me more about himself. Since the age of fifteen he's been dating older men--much older men. At fifteen he had a 'boyfriend' who was in his late 30s. I think he's been treated badly and it sounds like he's been put at risk of HIV infection by some unsavory characters who took advantage of an impressionable teenager.

We drove to a Burger King and I had dinner while he talked--editor of the school newspaper, has an after school job at Abercrombie & Fitch, likes shopping and coffee shops. He was utterly banal, in other words, you might dismiss him as another homogenized suburban white male in America.

These two spheres--I was captivated by their convergence in this one boy. He wore a jean jacket and A&F jeans and styled his hair and his dad was a hockey coach who probably would have kicked my ass to find me in bed with his son and his secret life is the meaningful search for an older man, a mass of chest hair to dive his hands into.

I found the whole thing quite radical. A much more laudable quest he's on then, say, an out gay man like myself in the safety of the liberal center city.

Gay boys

I was thinking of the earl of scooby the other day. Omnisexual gayboy sex offender. His myspace page is gone, but before they took it down I surfed around his friends. I read the profiles of out 16 year old gay boy drag queens and underage queers and out-and-proud junior high kids.

Last night I was on manhunt and got to talking to this eighteen year old kid. He thought I looked 'so fricken' cute' and he wanted to talk on the phone so I thought what the hell.

He is a senior in highschool and bubbled on and on about working at abercrombie and fitch, about this guy who he was seeing who ended up cutting his wrists, about doing his hair and shopping and how he loves his hair, he was bubbly and gay.

I said, listen, can I tell you something? I said, I've been thinking about this the past couple days. I graduated from highschool not so long ago and it strikes me that so much has changed in the past few years. Across suburbia its okay to be young and gay and out in highschool.

He said yeah, that was kind of the case. Not at all highschools, of course.

Of course.

My highschool was a redneck hellhole.

Weekends were spent drinking in pick-up trucks, having keggers at gravel pits, fuckin' gettin' herpes and shit.

A small city nearby was our only metropolis.

Of course I wasn't out--barely out to myself--and tried to hide, small as possible, corner of the lunchroom, dick shrunk up into my gym clothes, showering after everyone else, surrounding myself with sympathetic teachers.

I was sucking lots of cock though and gettin' ass and had a boyfriend in another town when I was a senior.

But two instances of unrequited lust stand out in my mind that I would like to share.

The therapist

My therapist ain't no pontalis

but he helps me / he's nice

scribbles things down

usually long loopy circles

while talk about myself

last night he said I lack connection / I should put myself out there / find a boyfriend

I told him that I felt really self conscious talking about all this stuff

I felt banal / middle class

"My life is so middle class!" I said, loudly, when my time was almost up.

"My life is made up of four things

working, working out, monday night orgies, and netflix."

he laughed and laughed

and then wrote down

"major depression."

he did

I saw him write it.

Manhatta toilets

In London, when I was sad or frightened, I would go to this one toilet in a dark and abandoned street.



I would smoke cigarettes, listen to the water dripping on pipes. It was cold. Men would come and cruise, suck each other off.



Against all better judgement I would spend hours there and I felt so safe, so protected by myslf and my clothes, my eyes were my weapons, no one spoke to me and I was not compelled to speak.



I saw it all, and only occasionally partook.

Just wishing

everyone was wrapped up in their game of trivial pursuit

i had arrived after the game had already started, so i was just sitting there drinking lite beer and being bored

i excused myself and said i was going to go have a cigarette

i wandered around the house and found myself in my ex boyfriend's bedroom

it was dangerous for me to be there but i couldn't help myself

i kicked at some clothes on the floor--did these belong to him or his boyfriend?

the old bed

i was sitting on a desk chair when he was suddenly in the doorway

hello there, what are you doing?

sorry...just wandering around

he looked at me nervously and said, what are you thinking about?

just wishing that things were different, i said

you mean that you are i were back together?

no i said, just wishing that you were someone worth fighting to get back

Seething

today I was depressed

i went to a shopping mall

i overheard a woman say to her husband, "you know what I want? i would really like some burger king coffee right now"

i went to express for men because that cheers me up

even though i am so not that store

i bought two shirts that made me feel momentarily happy

wandered out into the parking lot

couldn't find my car

the damn mall doesn't have any mnemic devices in the parking lots

i wandered for what seemed like hours

fell into a slough

when i woke up i was a princess

***

later in the night that feeling went away

i found myself playing trivial pursuit with some people including my exboyfriend and his new boyfriend

i realized i am still bitter

his boyfriend is crazy

i mean literally

he's addicted to pills, often unemployed, has mental problems

in short, i am way better than him

so why is he still with him and why did our relationship turn into great big globs of dogshit that are still stinking up my room

i am bitter and that depresses me

and i saw white heat at times in my eyes and i dreamed of stabbing

but im home now listening to the doves

Harangue

Exboyfriend of many, many years ago has a tendency to harangue me. It's a passive-agressive form of stalking, what he does. Letters, postcards to my mom, messages meant to get back to me. Myspace communications. Someday he'll show up on my doorstep and kill me, I'm sure of it. This time he pointed me toward an allegorical essay on Prometheus. I was the eagle.

Because this is secret I can talk about the orgy I went to last night

The orgy was pretty lame. I had been there twice before and usually there are a mix of men, 19 years old to about mid-30s, maybe a total of 10-15 people. The orgy is in a suburb far from the center of the city. It's in this nondescript condo development. With the closing of sex clubs and porno theaters and gay bathhouses its nice to know that naughty sex has migrated to the suburbs. Condos are so boring and ugly its heartening to think of a bunch of strange men buggering each other. Think about that.

When I arrived at the orgy there were seven guys smoking outside of the condo. Some of them looked cute. When I got in the orgy organizer, Jeff, was acting kind of nervously. Jeff is in his late 30s or so and he's pretty fat. He has an orgy every Monday night except for the nights when the local hockey team plays at home. Jeff never joins in the orgy. He just stands in the doorway to his master bedroom and watches guys fuck each other and once in a while he'll rub someone's back or kiss a dude's neck while he's getting sucked off but he always keeps his clothes on. I swear he's videotaping it all and that he jerks off to the tapes when we've all left. My secret plan is to ingratiate myself to him and get him to share with me his secret video tapes. I am positive they exist.

For some reason, the seven guys outside disappeared. I sipped from my can of Miller Lite. I had another. I really wasn't feeling it. Soon I just said to Jeff, hey, bro, I'm not feeling it. The way to Jeff's heart is to call him 'bro.' Jeff understood why I wasn't feeling it. He walked me to the door and grabbed my butt through my jeans. I told him I'd call him next Monday. The thing about having an orgy every week is, there's always next Monday.

This is a secret

This is a secret blog because I am really, really famous. I would get fired and you would be hunted down and shuttled to Uzbekistan via secret CIA flights routed through Gatwick if you revealed my true identity.

As for a nom de plume I chose Darling Daintyfoot because its really pretentious and sexy. You don't know who I am so I can be pretentious.

Other candidates were: Frank O'Hara's Fuckbuddy, Fernando Pessoa, Sal Mineo.