SOUTH CAROLINA
Before the Internet
Pixelated
i.
I was 15 in North Myrtle Beach,
skateboarding towards 420 World
under the stale haze of old billboards and tattered confederate flags. Big Mike worked there,
and it’s where the porn was.
My friend Lauren, who dated Big Mike, told me that I didn’t masturbate right.
I never put my hands in my pants.
I held a pillow under me
like a torso
something firm
and humped until I came.
I was bisexual,
I am still bisexual.
2 men and 1 woman kind of bisexual.
I am sure it existed in California,
but queer feminist porn wasn’t in my sphere
among titles like Karma (with a backwards R) and Cock Busting Teens part 3.
Devil’s Threesome: Hot, Wet, and Blonde: $19.99
A perfect bisexual DVD.
A “late bloomer” I guess,
though most boys in comparison to girls are.
Blooming in a world that viewed
me as female,
and was withering. Blooming in a world viewed
me as female,
was withering.
Too big for my britches / stunned,
a screaming groin.
So funny how quickly shock turns to arousal.
I skated home in the merciless sun,
the smell of softening asphalt below me
following an orgasm lantern adorned by a faint flicker.
ii.
The kissing was exhilarating,
the devil was a male character
playing the brother of the female character.
Pants were peeled,
my awkwardness deepened.
A sunset of an unnatural energy cast a shadow on my mind and boner, there was a contradiction
between the visual and the meaning.
Entropy
my shoulders/face/back stained red.
I wanted to be her brother/boyfriend?
I didn’t want this flesh,
my body,
to be touched
the way that the men touched hers.
Squinting/Furrowing brow gave focus to the sound,
Pixelated/my hard-on emerged.
15 minutes of panic-jerking
TV turned off
pulled up my underwear/grabbed a pillow.
An inaudible space
imbued with honeysuckle shampoo/Erin’s face.
She swept her pink bangs away
/I made her laugh in Wendy’s.
Drunkenly kissed my neck skinny dipping.
I turned to lightheaded glass
on another plane/a wave/a shudder/a tiny echo planted a seed that blossomed
in a boisterous and debilitating desire.
“brother and sister”
Nucky Thompson’s Final Scene
A half-baked coupe
trying to come to terms with my blood relations. Scorching highs, booming lows.
My family and Atlantic City
had the same facade,
being a big important machine
that doesn’t function now.
Eye contact on the bus,
fucking in the lifeguard boats
she took me to her girlfriend’s house
in Asbury Park.
Pieced together
that we weren’t together
at a Pride barbeque.
Under the boardwalk
two boys, engrossed, watched a video
on a flip phone: rotten.com
something was being eaten alive
rusty tap water
barefoot baby I found outside of the Wawa
the way that no window’s elapsed the city’s pitilessness time did too
until I was healing
from surgery
Boardwalk Empire,
my reason for living.
The only thing you can count on is blood
the blood in your veins and the blood that’s in mine.
Nucky Thompson dropped
like a full bottle
onto the boardwalk
the psychic without a crystal ball
read my palm that Summer
right there
where the fictional death lies
next to mine
perplexed and agitated, she said, “You’re a man.”
ASHEVILLE
Tomorrow, tomorrow
Your last breath
with a summer rain soundtrack
in the crook of a mountain.
I was down the mountain
parked in front of my house,
my girlfriend’s car.
The rain stroked the peripheral of the blue screen life
on my phone.
Giving cybersex a cadence with a man who lived far away.
When one wakes up they can hear the heat in North Carolina.
Pitch like a dog whistle,
only southerners understand.
The hum was louder that morning, as the cicadas cried. Why doesn’t the cicada offer any knowledge of its demise? Maybe the cicadas cried for you too.
The spin of the earth pierced the silhouette on the picnic blanket.
Surrounded by our friends, I stared into outer space.
Shrouded in the disgrace of jerking off while you died.
I avoided hormones
creep
as long as I could
a violent white man
out of fear of turning into
everything I hate
takes advantage of the living and the dead.
“They couldn’t even choose their meals on any given day. I can’t believe they could have chosen this.”
“I didn’t see them as selfish until now.”
How small of us.
We had just come out to each other,
only you and I knew that.
Wiping the tears from your cheek that night I whispered, “We can sleep on the playground
and if it rains,
we’ll bury ourselves in sand,
it’s cooler than our houses.”
CHICAGO
NASA
No kissing naked namelessness naïveté
A mirror that you watched yourself in afternoon abbs aloof Sadly, there was no foreplay seeking safeness salify Ariana Grande blasting abrupt avast abscond
NEW YORK
Planes Flying By
In Queens, I hear planes above the light pollution shipping
lives either closer to or past one another
while we endure the stickiness of August in the city.
Tiny bottles and cans
clinking in the houseless carts
from the basement apartment.
I hate it
When lovers only focus on my pleasure.
It should be requite.
It’s always like this: your head held between my
knees. I clutch your neck, labored breathing.
You look up.
Teary eyed with adoration: this is our tenderness, yet I am growing numb.
John Lennon’s beady eyes stare into mine
from the other side of your room.
The first girl I ever loved comes to mind as you say, “I’m your faggot, daddy.”
I nod.
She was afraid of pleasure and obsessed with it when we were younger.
She told me that on AIM
maybe?
If not,
it’s something we’d have typed out in Courier New
on LiveJournal.
