My culture betrayed me at birth,
Abandoned me on the West Coast
And stripped the heritage from my
Rosy red tongue
                                       the Cali sun
Kissing my ****** skin, carefully, softly,
Wrapping me in her white bed sheets
Calling me one of her own.

Too attached to
The memory of you
And your sunken dimples
That held up the happy curve of your lips
(And held up my world too),

The want in your voice
Coarse with loneliness and anguish,
Though evaporating when ******
Between us two
(My sweet words the answer to your sole prayer),

Your distant stare shielding
A wall of deep thoughts
Scared and shamed and lovingly true
(**** as the ocean blue)—
I love you.

Depression arrives suddenly at your door
Dressed in beautiful black linens
And a white shirt underneath,
Asking for your hand in a marriage so absolutely
Lovely you were dying to say yes, his
Words pooling over your broken frame,
Suspending you in his cold but comforting
Oceans that make you hunger for eternal
Sleep and decay until your Soul fades away
Into the shadowed inkling of a dream.

Some nights, my Blankie covers me up tight
And whispers filthy secrets to my bones:
“I’ll love you ‘til the warmth calms down your fright,
I’ll be here guarding you from dark Unknowns.”
He feeds me dreams that fill me up with hope—
So sweet like sin!—they never were to last.
By morning light I wake up, left to cope
With sandy eyes: the salt of good dreams passed.
But some nights—dark and dreary nights—when all
The world and stars are vexed under Selene,
He leaves (my ****** body bare)—His wall
Is never there to truly keep me clean.
He’ll never touch my skin again, for I
Will sleep with clothes that love me ‘til I die.

You were so beautiful,
Like a marble statue
Behind millions of dollars of security.
But now your insecurity
Has defiled your purity;
The glossy perfection
Turned rotten
At your crystal lips of limestone;
You flawless face, now
Fouled by fatality;
And worst of all:
Your once sweet words
Are now rancid with
Distaste of me,
And it simply destroys
The beauty I see in you,
A beauty greater than
Any Greek statue
Carved eons ago.
You don’t see that your ego
Sped up time’s flow,
Faded your glow.
You’re rubble, my friend,
You’re nothing but old.
My fires of love
Are suddenly cold.

I didn’t speak in fear of saying the wrong things,
Letting my insecurities build layered rings
To protect me from the vagrant eyes of society;
For years I grew up a silent and impervious tree
That feared the men who wouldn’t love me.

But then no, no, then you suddenly came along,
Full of mystery and conversation
In those Watergate lips and eyes like Nixon;
I should never have trusted your boyish conviction
When we met in September and you said ‘Hi Steven”
Like I was the most important person to you,
And how I downloaded a texting app just to
Write “Hi” back to you everyday and how you eventually told me
To change my last name to yours—you made a deep incision
Through every shell of skin I provisioned
For ordinary men like you.

But this is not a love story because
You were just an ordinary man
And I was just an extraordinary fool.
I thought we could drift forever lost
In the desert winds of my dearest dreams—
But love was a mirage and you were an oasis;
I took a sip from the shadowed pool at every cost
And ended up with a mouth full of sand.

This is not a love story because I didn’t know
Two guys could just be friends if they talked to each other like brothers
Because whenever I did, I was called a ***
For trying to pick up where my father left off,
For ignoring me my whole entire life because he cared more about his drug deal
Than his own family.

This is not a love story because you were a guy
And I was too obsessed with being what I wanted other people to see;
I didn’t want to be happy if it meant
Giving up the sweet internal peace that came with being
One hundred percent normal in America’s eyes.

This is not a love story because
It wasn’t written in the Bible.

This is not a love story because we live in a nation
Where having a crush on a guy labels me with damnation,
Where we teach our boys that love is only beautiful if it is in a woman
And that those who see otherwise are sin-ridden;
So many tongues tied to the tips of our teeth
Our nation’s sons and daughters beaten til the love runs red in a river of their tears;
These gender roles wring us out dry and drown us in a shadowed pool of fears.

I can proudly say I was in love with a guy,
But I won’t say it was for the right reasons.
I was blinded by the reality that maybe, just maybe,
Having intimate conversations with a man wouldn’t label me.
And it never will, not now, not ever,
Because I am not an ordinary man—
I am peculiar.
I am not yesterday
Because I am tomorrow night.
I am not a vagrant hiding in a black wood behind the skull
Because I am a redwood, rooted and full
With my outstretched arms soaring high into the sky
Because love is a blind sun that shines over us all,
Making our walls look as small
As the rubble when they fall and fall.

Some heavens ago
I loved you 'til I dropped
On my knees in the bathroom
(Hands chaining my head to the floor,
Body detaining my soaring heart)
And questioned reality,
Wagged my jammed forefinger
At the face of an ungodly god
For permitting my lust for you,
The sin smelling of musty sweat
And fake baking soda
To hide that unsure scent around me—
My primal instincts call your bluff
And I raise myself once more
To hunt for your wild soul,
The game hot and weary
But mortally necessary.
With eyes unsheathed you
Stand aloof—
I'm aiming right at your heart.