& tell me about the night, where we rushed the dawn towards
the silken effigy of silence and told it be quiet:
Told it that somewhere, two lovers were trying to sleep despite
their clothes still being wet from the river
they dragged their souls out from like some kind of lost treasure –
Their figures wrapped in shadow, nailed to warmth like a word
bending towards its own definition.
His hands, tracing the muscles on the others torso, each moan
echoed through the night as the salt cracked atop their skins
and beckoned again -
looking almost for a breathing space -
How we told the dawn that it was not yet to rise because Nathan had
not arrived home, and god knows his mother would
worry if he got there after the sun rose.
And somewhere other than here, Jay would be sitting on his roof top
trying to describe a body he has not yet been inside of.
Yes. Tell me of the night where the story had ended in that
way I hated stories to end,
with the cracking of egg shells
and screeching, a car with its wheels skidding across the scene -
This was the New America, and Nathan was begging for something
new to happen, for something to make him feel alive
just this once.
But the car did not crash, did not swerve and did not screech.
Instead the boys made it to their different homes in time, both preaching:
we are not filthy. We are not filthy. We are not filthy.
Only so many times that they could not feel appreciative
of the skin touched tender by another man, in some other space.
In a world where hate was not the cause of burning.
Where hiding was never considered an answer,
whenever it came to splitting the world in two,
for love.
