i.

Well I’ve never felt I belonged to any community really, certainly not a gay one, and this grey coastal city is so small, so I don’t know that it fucked me up, but I might have fucked them all, waiting on him to come in, the one different from the others lingering in every john whose ship’s appearance my widow-walk calls but no apparition follows, going down in droves on those ghosts waving contrapposto those ribald polari signals we read and howl in response while treading liminal those implausible ramparts, pacing with irrepressible edging anticipation that citadel whose squalor of white-stained walls no stone of which can recall how many times one man has climbed and fallen the same sighing mission, wasted there inimitable hours until dawn lavishes its brilliant obliteration upon moonlit sentinels its cold burn sobers once more until again we return, unarmed, ill-prepared to resort to the same ritual recourse this redoubt abhors but witnesses us perform all the more for any visitor is better than none, as any lover’s touch or possibility thereof is worth every effort even if it fails to work

                    ii.

in our hearts what warmth can reverse the harm and hurt of intrinsically disordered flesh, aborted aren’t we all when we expect to be accepted by an ideal now crumbling into the exigence of a repurposed monument, citing historical suffering as the subversive pull encouraging us to relive the fall, how small, how minimal, how diminishing, the return for so significant and worthless this perpetual investment in attacking loneliness without precision, going at it no strategy, knowing only the collision of two bodies though damaging results more often in collateral repercussions resounding in the body too loudly and not subtly for many eternities too dissonant to ally enemy orbits with, fading pulsars of wishes blink consequences I never wanted to constellate into my myth, damage has a way of shaping stars into heroic parts the heavens of their ambitions permit some part of their emptiness to inhabit, though no one can deny how fully I have already lived, even if always totally separate, big bangs require fires to exist on society’s fringes in order to accomplish the unfolding and flourishing of universes, burning out is nothing personal.