Instructions: Open another tab on your window, go to this site. Have good headphones. Press play. You can have it playing before you read this, while you read this, or afterwards. It is meant to be in conjunction with this piece.--k.]
(pause)
I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. – V.N.
Ah, Maurice. You were always so impossible. The fiber on the surface of that black water. How I would stare into it at night and wait for you to emerge from behind me in its reflection. Your scent of lilac and dirt. It was my hand that slapped your pretty face. The puff of powder that scattered from it when I did. But there were other times. Surely, you remember. There will forever be a link between you and my brother, and it disgusts me. It has nothing to do with your genitals.
That night amongst the trees when I met you, the light was a syrup of a particular green. A spoiled emerald of sickness and unnatural things: kidnappings and crime scenes. You materialized. You wore the garb of another time although when, exactly, was unnameable. It was part of your charm.
You, with your tailored lines and your wrist grip tight. Eyes of silver moving water: liquid mercury spilled upon fallen fir; the slightly sexual fear of being lost in the woods.
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It was a strange relationship, existing only within the reflection of mirrored surfaces although mirrors, themselves, proved fruitless. I would practice for hours to train my body to interact with yours-which I could only see behind me while looking just past myself in lakes, in windows, and in the filth I would pour out just to see you. I would learn how to arch in order to reach back, to touch you, to go against my instinct and move in a direction opposite than that which my brain had intuited me. Over time and with turbulent patience, it became second nature. What I could not see of you, I could feel, and this was more than enough in its sensation.
Saint Sebastian,
How your perverse arrows left us craving
the exact moment
of puncture
Sucking our tongues in savor as we imagine
arrow
after arrow
all the while
body bound to a tree
and still, you stood your ground.
Maurice would stand behind me, attentive in the way one is at night- uncertain of what surrounds them. He would not be touching me, but I could feel the warmth of his fingertips just beside the pulse of my neck. There was a tempt that he enjoyed. He never knew exactly how to tell me what it was that he wanted, and for this I would spend nights with my fingers on the insides of his arms reading the inverse of the Braille that ran through his veins. There was a way his blood would scream, and for me, it unrolled the song of a thousand sirens.
I would awake sometimes at night, a perfumed envelope slipped under my pillow. I would press it to my face, intoxicated with its scent, and descend back into velvet folds of sleep. When finally, I awoke, I would have its mark on my flesh for hours: the ribbed-shell pattern of his communique.
Oh Maurice, with your feline-like cheekbones and sideways moving eyes, how were you able to see me amidst all the shadows cast to hide me?
There is a silence that rocks me
a breathing
Saint Sebastian will look at you
plainly
to see what it is you are proud of
and what it is you are not willing to hide.
Every time I would see you in the reflection of the water, every time you managed to slide up next to me as I gazed, I could hear the sound of a heavy, metal vault being closed. The finality of sound. The zipping up of that long, black bag; the closing of a mouth.
I wanted only to see you. Face to face, and fully looking into your eyes.
The temper one has when an alarm is sounding is the inability to be calm. Each strike of sound grates deeper into the furthest tips of the nervous system. Eyes pulsating in the same rhythm- a burning that begins inside the forearms (closest to the elbows), the sides of our faces, and our chests. There are urges that I can’t quite control, but need you know of them? It is the difference between sliding my arm into that of a man, and sliding my arm around the tiny waist of an androgynous creature living just out of reach.
Maurice, I am sorry. When you fell, I meant to catch you. We were dancing: My lad’s front against your gentleman’s waist. Surely, you could feel my intention. Surely you saw my grasp reach into a desperate fist for you just after your quick descend.
I meant to catch you. There is always that one look, a shift, that pulls us from such a moment of ecstasy, into a final dawn. Our eyes met without surface for the first time.
(pause)
There are times now, when looking into the puddles of the most scum-filled allies, that I sense him. Swear I see him slip away from behind me. I turn to look him full in the face, and there is nothing. [Perhaps a rat- that sleek animal that reminds us that something is willing to eat our waste, and disease us in the same movement. Such strange influence these creatures have.].
At times I feel him breathing into both my ears at the same time, and it is only this that alerts me to what is not possible.
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