Suburbia in the inner city

Was visited by the suburban boy last night, out of the blue in a&f's...


He called me randomly near midnight, complaining bitterly about an older man he liked who had just relapsed into meth binge after three years of sobriety, like, in his lap basically, and he had dropped him off and needed to 'vent.'

Venting for him was tender makeouts on the bed in my room.

It had been a long time since I had touched and been touched and we just slowly laid there, kissing and stroking for the longest time.

There was something insouciant about it all, our defenses gone, no pretense or borders under lock-and-key.

Eventually I entered him from behind and we rocked back and forth like that for the longest time, and when we finished he fished his hands through my chest hair again, looking for something...

Been thinking

Walking around and staring out the bus windows at the shops and everyone flapping in the wind like crows and I'm not scared for him, or really sad, or that jittery and upset...what comes to pass will pass whether I like it or not.

If anything, I'm sad, slightly pissed, beating my metaphorical fists against the figurative drum of the sky, wishing I had a different dad. It was kind of a waste--I mean, it's rare in life that fate squishes you into close proximity with another human being for a period of many, many years...and, well, I guess you should just expect that the two people sharing said patch of ground would have done more for each other, found out more, shared more and influenced more than my dad and I ever did, a pale drop of dadness as far as essences go.

found out

I found out today that my dad has prostate cancer. We don't know yet how advanced it is, how treatable it is. We'll know more soon.

I don't know how I feel. But that's a lie. I don't feel much--I'm not worried or scared or sad for him. I just take in the news and move on. Often when we say, "I don't know how I feel," it's often because we really do know how we feel, but the feeling is not the one we wish we had.

Pessoa's trunk

"Autopsicografia"

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só que éles não têm.

E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão
Ésse comboio de corda
Que se chama o coração

—Fernando Pessoa

-----------------------**------

"Self-Analysis"

The poet is a forger who
Forges so completely that
He forges even the feeling
He feels truly as pain

And those who read his poems
Feel absolutely, not his two
Separate pains, but only the
Pain that they do not feel

And thus, diverting the
Understanding, the wind-up
Train we call the heart
Runs along its track.

—George Monteiro

--------*---*-----------

"Autopsychograph"

Poets are liars.
They lie so completely
That they make up pain
Even when they're hurting.

Readers of poetry
Can know this pain,
Not the real ones of course,
But the imagined ones.

And on the train rails
Huffing, fooling the head
This little toy engine
We call the heart.

—James Parr

-------------****-----*---

"Autopsychography"

Poets pretend
They pretend so well
They even pretend
They suffer what they suffer.

But their readers feel
Nor the pain that pretends
Nor the pain that is
But only their own that isn't real.

And so upon toy rails
Circling reason like an art
Runs round the model train
That's known by the name of heart.

—Martin Seymour-Smith

Sneakin' a Peek

Sometimes I'll be watching an amateur porn and the background, the 'sets' that double as a random hotel room or someone's living room for god's sake will stop me in mid stroke. Can you believe that tapestry? I'll say to no one in particular. Or I'll call up my friend Colleen and say, 'Colleen, have you seen this tapestry? It's hideous!' but she won't know what I'm talking about of course. Or I'll catch out of the corner of my eye a Braun espresso machine, black, with built-in milk steamer, and I'll just have to have one.

The other night I was watching a Sneek Peek video. Of course I didn't buy it, I downloaded a torrent of it. Anyway, while watching "Blowin Da Boyz 3" I couldn't help but notice the feline theme going on in this guy's apartment...check it out:
















In one of the first scenes the pornographer drags his prey into the master bedroom where the bed is covered in leopard print sheets and a giant leopard tapestry is pinned to the wall. I had a dumb friend in highschool I used to fuck and he had the same thing...It was some kind of blanket that he thought looked so fucking cool that he had to pin it up on the wall and it just looked retarded but it gave me something to look at while I fucked him. Same thing is going on here.
















As this one carb-face enters the apartment he walks past this giagantic cat scratching-palace. This is one of those giant toys lonely people buy for their cats because they imagine there's this great bond between them and the pet, and they think that the pet will just love them to death for buying them such a carpet-mansion, but of course the cat doesn't give a shit which just makes the owner, in this case the single pornographer who likes to blow carbfaces on film, feel even more like a sad loser, which means, that to make himself feel better, he has to buy even more tiger trinkets...

















See that lion in the background there? And on the chair we can count not one, not two, but three different kinds of feline prints.
















Behind this dude, a white tiger stuffed animal and another tiger, camouflaged behind the houseplant.
















Hard to see, but at the bottom of the screengrab, to the right of the desk's keyboard, you can see the man's real cat, probably running away to hide, which the cat does everytime the dude brings home some stranger to blow. You know, cats have a pretty good sense of smell and they hate to smell their owner's spit on another dude's stinky dick and his cum. Yuck! At least if I was a cat I would hate the stench of that.

















God damn another white tiger.
















Doesn't that look majestic?

Shit that was better than sex.

Because this is a secret blog

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart" [Fernando Pessoa]

Outwardly, I despise Valentine's Day...hate it, denounce it.

My bitterness drips.

My jadedness glistens.

People are impressed--I'm so over it.

Love is like, a cultural construction. Man. Get with it.

Inwardly though, I have felt lonely for sometime, and today, I can't help it, but I wish I had a boyfriend. I can't really picture him but I have written, in secret, page after page of attributes...the equivalent of a schoolgirl (or boy) writing in the margins of their bluebook the name of their secret crush again and again and again.

Dynamism, compassion, humor, well-read, kind eyes, open face, tender and thoughtful, demonstrative, quiet, spontaneous.

Tonight, I clear my calendar of all obligations.

I spend a lot of money on a nice dinner for us. We're the youngest, sexiest couple in the restaurant. He's brought me a rose. The restaurant attracts an upper middle class, white, straight, suburban millieu. They are incredibly deferential to us, feeding each other ice creams and kissing across the table.

We walk hand in hand. It starts to snow.

It's not even about sex anymore. Sex is boring. The Monday night orgy? Like a Monday night workout. Let's do this for an hour and get it over with so I can take a shower and get a burrito for dinner. I miss when B and I were dating and we would wake up on a Sunday morning, fuck, lay around in the bed and get high and read the New York Times and then fuck again on top of the Arts & Leisure section. Or we'd go downstairs and get breakfast at one or two pm.

Sex is so passé, don't you think?

Tonight I have half a mind to break into the local gym where I work out (the gym closed many hours ago; it's quite late).

I'd turn on one lamp above one treadmill and run for hours and hours and look out at the snow.

Right now it feels like I could run twelve, fourteen miles maybe, do it for hours and listen to music on my headphones.

I wish I had a boy whom I loved and who loved me. I feel so Whitman right now, so Calamus. When I was a boy, fifteen or so, I bought Whitman's Leaves of Grass...why? A sympathetic English teacher, probably, older and married and yet kin to me somehow, put me on to the trail, knowing that I would find what I was looking for, and in that huge volume I somehow came to the Calamus poems as if through divination and read this one which has always been my favorite:

} A Glimpse

A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove
late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and
seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.

Tonight I think about it again and wish it was true. I was alone a lot then as I am now. When you see me at work I make fun of you and your boyfriend or girlfriend in a casual way, making it clear that the single life is the life for me right now. But really I am wishing for it too--someone worth buying a big fucking box of chocolates for. Happy Valentine's Day.

Bathhouse, Liverpool Street, September, 2005

I loathed the men in the bathhouse. I kept seeing these old guys--around late 50s, early 60s who were hobbling around, stooped and hairy-backed, lunging for me as I walked past and how sad that looked and these men deceitful in the shadows and coming across as early 20s when really they're 40 and only showing age around the edges of the eyes, calderas, brimstone on their cheeks, old volcanoes, faces like cracked continental drifts. One was very agressive and wherever there was a cock to suck he was in there to suck it. I had to push them off of me. A few times I put my heel in a puddle of jizz and that really disgusted me and made me afraid of what I might be soaking up by way of osmosis...

Pachyderms, lifting the bones of the dead
with their fat, white trunks.
Their time draws night-light in the chinks
of the boarded up windows,
Brazilian letting his feet hang over the rim
into the taxis and cobalt between clients
and splooge mops resting,
breathing heavily in the corners like baleen.

They hear time thundering,
and the older ears, the wide ears that wrap
my lips in the crowns of their hair,
spell a bit,
rain over there,
thudding like a giant foot,
like your hand on a rail
and they come along,
clearing the hall of bones like how a man shaves.

gay.com

random gay.com chat:

[him_him] hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] wanna phone?
[him_him] can u sound fem, impersonate my g/f only more kinky/sexual, etc. ?
[xxxxxxxxxx] yeah
[xxxxxxxxxx] ??
[him_him] talk on here real quick as fem, as g/f just so i see how good u can be with it
[him_him] then we can talk on phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] cool
[xxxxxxxxxx] so, stud, u horny?
[him_him] god baby, i def am.... missed bein with u babe
[xxxxxxxxxx] ive spent all day in these tight panties..
[xxxxxxxxxx] thinking about you in class, geting all wet under my skirt...
[him_him] mmm thats fuckin hot katie--- very nice
[him_him] good girl
[xxxxxxxxxx] thought about fingering myself in class but then thought...no, better wait for my man
[xxxxxxxxxx] how about yu stud?
[him_him] mmm god katie thats awesome--- would be real naughty if u did that while u were student teaching or since u are up visiting ur family, being naughty up there
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm i wonder if the students noticed how wet i was?
[xxxxxxxxxx] u horny for me stud?
[xxxxxxxxxx] wanna talk to me stud about my wet pussy?
[him_him] fuck yeah... now thats hot...
[xxxxxxxxxx] can i call u stud? i miss you so much...my pussy is so wet...
[him_him] fuck yeah baby--- let me get rid of everyone else so i can focus all on u on the phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] k stud
[xxxxxxxxxx] god my pussy is so wet thinking about you
[xxxxxxxxxx] are you hard stud?
[him_him] mmm u talkin like this is getting me very excited to talk to u katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] whats your name stud?
[xxxxxxxxxx] really? are you getting hard thinking about THIS pussy?
[him_him] chris--- yeah the more u know about my real g/f and can act like her, the crazier u will drive me
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris i miss that big dick of yours
[xxxxxxxxxx] home alone here i tried to fuck myself with a cucumber but it wasn't big enough
[him_him] wow baby thats so naughty-- and u never finger urself katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm i do when u aren't around
[xxxxxxxxxx] theres a lot you dont know about me
[xxxxxxxxxx] like, im always horny
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh lets talk on the phone chris
[him_him] wow baby thats so naughty--- u do any naughty things when u are teaching at school or what would u do if i was up there at ur parents house
[him_him] one more min baby and then im all urs
[xxxxxxxxxx] if u were up here at my parents house we'd wait till they were asleep
[xxxxxxxxxx] my panties would be wet all night
[xxxxxxxxxx] id take them off and give them to you
[xxxxxxxxxx] and lead you outside
[xxxxxxxxxx] someplace quiet
[xxxxxxxxxx] and just kneel before your big dick
[xxxxxxxxxx] beg you to take it out
[him_him] mmm fuck yeah--- blow me before going in to see ur parents, my cum on ur lips when u go into see them-- they not knowing what ist is though
[xxxxxxxxxx] mmm kiss my daddy hello with your cum on my lips?
[him_him] fuck yeah baby--- naughty shit like that
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris lets phone
[xxxxxxxxxx] im all yours
[him_him] and can u sound fem
[xxxxxxxxxx] yeah
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh honey hell yes
[xxxxxxxxxx] u make me feel like a little slutty bitch
[him_him] fuck yeah... let me get my phone-- what are we gonna talk about-- a scene or just talking in general?
[xxxxxxxxxx] what ever you want chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] what do you want your slutty katie to do?
[him_him] mmmmm maybe talk about all the naughty things we can do at ur parents house when we visit them
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok chris
[him_him] like the blowjob, u feeding me ur pussy juices, ur hot ass juices--- u sleep upstairs with ur sister and i have to sleep downstairs
[him_him] as many fucked up situations like with the cum and kissing ur daddy, etc
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok
[xxxxxxxxxx] how old is my sister?
[him_him] 11
[xxxxxxxxxx] lets do it chris
[him_him] k katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] me call ?
[him_him] sure--- XXX-XXX-XXXX
[xxxxxxxxxx] ok chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] im calling
[him_him] k
**** Connection Closed ****
[xxxxxxxxxx] thanks chris
[xxxxxxxxxx] maybe we can do that again sometime
[him_him] anytime--- u were very hot
[him_him] very impressed
[him_him] ive never really phoned before so hope it was good for u
[xxxxxxxxxx] did ii do good?
[xxxxxxxxxx] oh chris you were THE BEST
[him_him] yeah-- very good--- all about detail and u did get for a first time-- more u know/learn about her, the crazier it is
[xxxxxxxxxx] u can tell me
[him_him] sweet--- will def. do what i can to get u off for going to all the effort for being katie
[xxxxxxxxxx] it was an effort... i loved it
[him_him] sweet...very hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] did u really cum chris?
[xxxxxxxxxx] my pussy is still wet for u
[him_him] yeah i did--- def. made me shoot my load babe
[xxxxxxxxxx] so u get into dudes at all?
[him_him] thats fuckin hot
[him_him] a little-- mostly into girls with their smooth body/hot outfits, etc....
[him_him] although having a bro being str8/masc around g/f or friends, fuckin around is hot
[him_him] being str8/masc around g/f, being her friend then impersonating her for me in private, etc
[xxxxxxxxxx] thats hot
[xxxxxxxxxx] having a bud whos your bitch
[xxxxxxxxxx] is your katie not very kinky?
[him_him] yeah--- gettin real close to my g/f just so they can learn to act like her more, give us an excuse to hang out as str8 bros when really u are being her
[him_him] she is FUCKIN HOT-- crazy hot-- just not real sexual
[him_him] grew up real strict and catholic-- getting better but nowhere near where all my fantasies are
[xxxxxxxxxx] cool
[him_him] yeah
[him_him] so u think these scenes/things are hot?
[xxxxxxxxxx] HELL yeah
[him_him] awesome--- can take it as far as u want--- have a fem s/n just like hers, to drive me wild before phone, tellin u ALL about her, maybe show u pics of her, u sendin pics as her, in panties, etc.... the more the hotter
[him_him] and whatever gets u off too, def.
[him_him] well im out bro-- gettin some sleep --- hit me up sometime if u wanna do this again--- xxxxxx@yahoo.com xxxxxxx on yahoo messenger

if he finds me i'm dead

H...ere's a confession for my secret bl...og...

I lived in northern england for a while, in a tiny town surrounded by damp hills.

I ate a lot of Colt's Foot Rock and sat around in cum-stained underwear, watching Cadinot porn and writing a novel.

No work permit and the boyfriend away all the time.

He was in his late 30s and I had just turned 21. He worked at a home for retarded people and I jerked off a lot and drank beer and lounged around on this uncomfortable futon and wrote down numbers of other lonely guys thinking I'd cheat on him but I never did.

Once he found a number I had written down in the opening pages of Giovanni's Room and we had a big fight about that and later he forced sex upon me but usually things were chill and we drove around a lot, fucked, ate pizzas, watched movies, blah blah blah.

My novel was about a young American who fucks around on his English boyfriend with a young polish dude in London.

It was all true, which was the major fault of the novel.

We broke up, it ended badly, and he's never gotten over me.

Recently I found his myspace profile. He's, what, in his early 40s now?

Shhh.

I read his myspace blog which is pathetic and sad and boring.

The other day he wrote about me.

And that's when things suddenly became very difficult for me. Within seconds, my heart was hammering and my stomach leaping up to wobble thumpingly at the back of my throat. (So much for a mellowed evening with malt whisky and a brief blog / chat).

I asked XXXX to stop and explained that I could not hear about Darling Daintyfoot - it is unhelpful for me. Or, rather, I 'd be more than happy to hear from him and try to sort out some of the spoil from our past relationship, which troubles me (not sure about Darling Daintyfoot) so very deeply.

To know that after all these years...

It filled me with a dirty swill of prideful power, to know I still had this kind of control.

linked

I just linked to

Blair Mastbaum: Bat Society

I just linked to his blog. I'd like him to send me a photo of him playing the guitar naked. He could use the guitar to cover up the naughty bits.

Someone asked, "are your posts modern poetry er sumthin?" No, but thank you for writing. They are not. But if these posts were typed on an Underwood, my typewriter ribbon would be inked by Matthew Rohrer, Christopher Nealon, Matthea Harvey, Tao Lin, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

longtemps

il ya longtemps since I felt a calmness come about.

Icy and metallic, like the smell of snow when there's nothing else to smell.

On Saturday night my old, sedentary parents went to their separate bedrooms at around eight pm as though they were still farmers.

My car turned over slowly in the cold but eventually I made it into town, across the bridge, to another town.

Where railroad tracks cut through downtown and many of the streetlamps have been broken by drunken kids or simple neglect.

On one of the main drags is a gay bar.

This gay bar burned down a few years ago. Cause is still unknown, but two men sitting in a pickup truck outside the bar were burnt up in the conflagration, their bodies so badly charred that it was impossible to tell whether they were dead before the fire was started. The bar was rebuilt immediately a few blocks away.

Even though I visit only once every few months, there's always someone there who recognizes me.

The Professor.

The two bears I almost slept with.

I got to talking to a fine woman named Rhonda who works in a papermill a few towns south. She was looking for a woman with a kind heart and we commisserated.

A cute boy weighing as much as a snow drift kept eyeing me but he left for the cold before we had a chance to speak.

Really not interested.

Borders are secure; tests came back negative.

No HIV in my body. No, no, nothing.

I want to be chemically castrated.

I'll turn down invitations to the Monday night orgy.

I want to get my back waxed, get a haircut and a massage, tone my skin with expensive lotions, buy a new pair of expensive jeans, run six miles on a treadmill and take a giant shit, give myself a facial, smoke some pot and eat a giant piece of cake.

I don't want anyone to touch me. Stay away, speak from a distance, don't breathe on me, don't touch me, don't sully me or try to get inside of me.

I am impervious.

Just let me relish it for a few months.

i love it that somewhere

Oh please let it be true.


That somewhere, on some night these two boys cuddled and then fought. The world would redeem itself if it were so...

flesh

Take a deep breath.

Breathe in.

And out.

And in again.

Steel yourself.

This is why you set up a secret blog...

Since adolescence I have been a hypochondriac. It's etiology could be traced back to third grade, when I came down with acute appendicitis. For over a week my condition remained undiagnosed. I laid in bed in immense pain, vomitting every few hours and when finally brought to the emergency room X-rays showed that my appendix had burst. On the X-ray, shades of gray flooded my trunk from lung to bladder, representing the swill of bacteria and pus my guts were swimming in. I was rushed into emergency surgery, only a few hours before my body went into shock.

Two surgeries and four weeks of convalescence later, I was physically fine, though I had developed an acute distrust of both my body and the world. It's machinery could fuck up at any moment, and I could not trust the outside world and its authority figures--parents, doctors, modern medecine, to fix it quickly and promptly.

At the age of twelve I became convinced I had breast cancer. No doubt influenced by an episode of 20/20 on breast cancer during which Barbara Walters interviewed a man who was suffering from breast cancer--yes, men could get it too, though it was much rarer. My tits were big with baby fat but behind it, my fingers, kneading them during my nightly self-examination, could feel harder lumps, near the rib cage.

My mother took me to the doctor, who confirmed that I was merely going through puberty and that hardenings in my male mammaries were a common, but often unnoticed part of the process.

At thirteen I became convinced I had diabetes. My frequent trips to the bathroom to urinate were the primary source of my self-diagnosis, combined with the family medical dictionary, whose crude drawings of triage and cross-sections of the human body did not cease to enthrall me. In the hospital after my appendix operation, I had become fascinated by what was happening inside my body and indulgent relatives had bought me copies of Gray's Anatomy and pop-up books of the human body and tomes on organs and chemical processes. My mother, who was rather indulgent of my hypochondria, perhaps feeling that it was better to take me to the doctor and have my worries dispelled then ignore them as if they didn't matter, indeed brought me to the doctor, who, after I explained to him my diabetic symptoms, confirmed that I had only a small bladder.

I was probably slightly disappointed. Diabetes was a manageable disease that would get me attention, special treatment. I wouldn't have to take gym class! In addition, my own powers over my body had let me down.

The only other serious case of hypochondria as a youth was the thought that I had become schizophrenic, like my father. I was seventeen or eighteen.

Freud deals little with hypochondria, subsuming it under the larger heading of Narcisism. For Freud, hypochondria derived from a profound wonder of the body and its many systems and marked a withdrawal of the libido from the outside world, repositioned on the organs and systems of the body. In its own twisted way it represents an eroticization of one's own body--internal and external.

I think I can remember the first time the fear of catching death through sex with other men caught me by the throat. I had been dating a cute, dynamic, uberintelligent boy named Montreal Jason. A week after meeting (and fucking profusely), we drove to Montreal together for a week, just for kicks, twenty-four hours, all through the night, to spend a week in a glorious city neither of us knew, fucking like rabbits and spending days and nights out in the city. Soon after our return, the mirage faded and truths emerged--he had another boyfriend, he had lied to me, etc. Soon after my glands swelled to rock-hard peas. Non-Hodkins Lymphona, surely. It was brought on through acute exposure to unrequited love. Like going outside without your jacket on.

And then it was HIV.

Since then its always been HIV.

Cum and cocks. Love them. But to get their full flavor, for them to touch you in the way you want to be touched, they've got to pass through a membrane, both literally and figuratively. At this point I'm more interested in the physical lips, the anus, the mucous membrane, the semi-permeable chains of molecules that let in some cells, keep other cells out. At a micro level, swarming at the gates--love and something dumb and blind yet personified by our culture into an insidious agent that hates gays, hates love and freedom.

There is another theory of hypochondria. Taking Freud's theory of Delusions of Persecution, in which the subject feels as though the world is out to get him, kill him. Its irrational--sinister spies on every corner, a global conspiracy to target and kill him. The delusion of persecution is the twisted doubling-back of a blunted libido--the unrequited desire becomes poisonous, turns back on the desirer. Transmitted along the lines of physical contact that pierce the body at various points (ass, mouth), the delusion of persecution becomes internalized. For someone like me, I wanted to be loved, to be held by men. And when that didn't happen, that want, a tender-nerve, turned back against me, became internalized. The men I wanted to love me didn't love me, so instead were trying to make me sick. All so that I could hate them.

Powerless as well. When the cock is in your mouth you are powerless. It has pushed its way past the membrane, it has shattered the defences. Some love the feeling. I hate it. I want to patrol my own borders, ruthless monitor the comings and goings. So a few months ago when the guy I knew to be HIV positive pushed his cock into my mouth, and I tasted the precum, and my thought was, (there is HIV in this precum), I freaked. Said I couldn't do it anymore. Walked outside into the backyard and sat naked in the cold grass. It was August first, 2005. I walked with him into the woods, deeper and deeper, the branches picking at our bare soles, barely any mosquitoes, and we walked until we couldn't see the lights of the house anymore and we stood their in the hush and heard only a distant freeway and didn't say anything and then walked back to the house.

I was fine for a while and then the panic attacks started. I would search the web for the symptoms of seroconversion. Every cough, every puffy gland in my neck was a sign, a symptom. I broke out in sweats, couldnt' concentrate at work. Three months passed and I was negative.

The rash came suddenly across my arms and torso last week. Itching in bed. Red spots up my forearms and across my sides, my thights, covering my ass, extending down to the webbing between my toes. I surfed the web and began thinking back...to the eighteen year old suburban boy and to the Monday night orgy. The eighteen year old boy had talked, post-coital, about the older men who fucked him, one of whom was HIV positive. I thought back to the orgy, and how, poppers under my nose, I had sucked that one big dick as deep into my mouth as it would go. Dude was probably a meth head. The web confirmed my timelines, gave weight to my imagined symptoms. I visited my doctor and he said he wanted to do a blood test to determine a viral loud count. The sweat broke out immediately. He was old and had a gray ponytail and he was in and out in fifteen minutes. He didn't know me. He didn't know my risk. Viral load count. Should I worry? I asked. I'll worry, he said, for you. He smiled and scooted out.

Is he worrying for me--really? Is he up late at night?

I left the doctor's office on Monday and drove to a gas station.

Bought a pack of Camel Lights.

I quit smoking about ten months ago.

I drove along the interstate, smoking and listening to Aimee Mann.

The interstate ended and I took a random off-ramp, traveled down some dark suburban streets, turned left into a cul-de-sac of McMansions. The lights were blazing in all the windows.

They were not yet occupied.

I looked through the vast expanses of living rooms, populated with golden furniture, at the black backyards.

A sign read, "No driving practice allowed."

At the end of the road I turned around and headed back onto the interstate.

Test results tomorrow afternoon.

*67

I have various fake profiles on gay.com that I assume from time to time.

Depending on my mood.

I hang out in the rooms 'College' and 'Phone.'
















One of my profiles I play around with is a 21 year old black male.















These are photos emailed to me by a guy, also 21, who wanted to talk on the phone with me and call me 'nigger' and dominate me verbally and 'phone-fuck' me.

So I called his phone number on my cellphone, hitting *67 first, and talked in a very quiet voice and he called me rude things like 'nigger' and told me how hard he was going to fuck my black ass.

I was fake and he could have been too, those photos I mean. They could have been fake photos. The guy on the other end of the line could have been this guy or he could have been someone else...another twenty-one year old or another kind of man altogether--does it matter?

He spoke his particular truth for the night. He described something that was deep down inside of him.

Manhunt obituary

Via monotonous dot net, this strange obituary that limns the faults and contradictions of the internet communities many gays feel an ambivalent connection to. Cuteboingeorgia gets into JO, sucking, fucking, 1 on 1, exhibition, LTR, friends, dating but he's currently 'not looking' because he's dead, something having to do with a fall from four stories or so.

His myspace.com profile survives as well, the comments section giving one-dimensional friends a one-dimensional space in which to write a one-dimensional goodbye.

On gay.com or manhunt.net some of the same images circulating in the mix come to form architecture and populate those particular virtual rooms. Should we tie a portion of our psyche to the page, to the 'online communities' of hook-ups and barebackers and online ranters and friends and tweakers only some of whom extend into the fleshy realms beyond the computer screen, we tie a bit to those images as well, and they to us--part of the familiar scene, faces in the crowd that we may not see or care about until we notice out of the corners of our eyes that they are gone, or until we are hit over the head by a reminder that they exist or existed in the flesh as well through an announcement of their death.

He's not looking.

He's offline.