those middle years were a slow build toward urgency boys jerking off under their desks in the middle of class desire growing in me a plant i didn’t know how to water or weed that body so far from mine i can’t pretend to know what it wanted just the distant roots of fantasy being found in a dark hallway with the remnants of blood and then we kiss suffering as a catalyst for love is in the water of all my teenage dreamscapes a combination of a) understanding love as the reason people stay alive but finding no way out of my dead garden i needed to create a love that could live there with me so i made pain integral to love itself b) seeing no possibility for real true sweet love everyone in the movies dying or being killed or going straight i removed myself in concert with other forces working to expel me from the fantasy of joy c) i derived an off balance property of equality that if love is vulnerability and if the deepest form of vulnerability is a sharing of pain then love must be a transaction of pain even now six years into a love so good and stable i am willing to build my life on top of it i watch myself the way i imagine god or some alien other watches me waiting for my wrong move the way he watched in childhood we communicated through ritual i sent messages in the shape of dirty clothes laid out like my body on my bedroom floor listening to the grease soundtrack three times a night while i prayed at him to keep my parents alive every day they lived was a relief and a threat language grew mythic and heavy hung low out of earshot i was always missing something and the feeling was i would miss it forever the path from here to the concerns of my adolescence is unsurprising cutting another ritual another attempt at working through the intangible by building it out of the materials of our world an expression of pain a heightened urgency why would i tell you this way letting you in to my true self by letting you look into my body but you are no unflinching punishing god you cannot bear to look maggie nelson asks what is the work looking doesn’t do she cites a banner from ACT UP STOP LOOKING AT US START LISTENING TO US and i realize the issue i wanted them to listen to the wound hear what it spoke underneath but they could only see its surface

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.