Espousal

I’ll never have a son or daughter.
I’ve been, of course, the one to slaughter
any hope of it. It’s not just that I’m gay.

I might have fostered progeny in countless
other ways than through the missionary
mounting of a female. I’ve been a son

and brother: I am the witting beneficiary
of unwitting chance: the coupling of a father
and a mother in the old accepted dance.

I wonder what I’ve done with
what’s inside my pants. Venus
hasn’t met my penis: Mars too often has.

And yet I’ve known a kind of jazz epiphany
through something that might be construed
as procreative sexual abandon: libidinizing

life – as if I’d had a wife with whom
I’d peopled all the substance of Manhattan.
New York City is my spouse and child,

and I am its.
If I have a generative purpose,
here’s where it sits.


 
 
 
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