'Gay Pride' Weekend in New York 2008

Confluence of mind with New York City weather
tethers both to pilings in a psychic bay: today you sway
between sharp shower-spatters breaking from
the bursting late-June clouds – tapping chaos on
the air conditioner – and memories of smoky fog
and drunken air when you – at twenty-six or -seven –
stumbling on the piers – the far west village –

Christopher and West Streets – weren’t quite all there:
sweating for a quart or two of sex or vodka or some
other drug you hadn’t met yet but which surely would
transport you somewhere more intensely vibrant
than you’d managed to create so far: you wonder
if the bar you found then – funky, dark, demonic,
near the river – left its ghosts along the posts of your

invisible foray into that psychic bay that confluences
of your mind create with New York City weather now:
blithering and aching for a touch, a fuck, a pow –
a sucking-up to something utter and un-tethered:
something free and swelling and too irresistibly
alluring to exist. There is no shortcut to the prize, but
there’s no long way either: take a breather, sweetheart,

listen to New York imbibe this fine deliciousness –
and let it take a lick of you – now happily inside and cool
and grateful you’re the kind of fool who’s found out
how to soothe himself, but – Lord knows – hadn’t
then. Let that boy walk sodden through the pouring
rain toward his bodily delights until he finds them,
as he will – as you do, thirty long years later, still.


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