I’ll
never have a son or daughter.
I
slaughtered any likelihood of that.
It’s
not just that I’m gay. There are other
ways
to foster progeny than through
.
the
customary man and woman family plan.
But
I’m content to be the witting beneficiary
of
unwitting chance: the coupling of a father
and
a mother in the sanctioned pleasures
.
of
the ancient dance, which however by some
measures failed by not producing others
through
new fathers and new mothers to the line.
My brother’s sexual proclivities reflected
mine.
.
Venus never met our penises: Mars perhaps
too often has. And yet I’ve known a kind of jazz
epiphany
through procreative sexual abandon:
libidinizing
life – as if that were the apparatus
.
of
a wife with whom I’ve peopled my New York.
(Blake
sat naked in his London garden, singing
to
his progeny of poesy, heralded by angels
in
his trees.) I am among this city’s
legacies.
.
New
York is my spouse and child; I am its.
If
I have a generative purpose, here it sits.
But
am I only apparatus? Do I have blood?
I
dream I’m standing with my father and my
.
brother
in a downpour of precipitating mud.
Solipsism
drops in dollops of itself, discarded like
denatured
coffee grounds, forgotten by the pot.
My
epitaph’s a rueful laugh: “I’m all I’ve got.”
.
.
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