"Do you smoke?" you asked
as you let a gray cloud drift away from your mouth.
"No" I said quetly, ashamed that you might think I wasn't cool.
I avoided giving you that speech about dying soon.
You stayed quiet and inhaled from that toxic stick one last time
and pressed your lips gently onto mine.
I tasted the Marlboro's on your tongue
and became addicted to smoking from your kiss.

I dare not let you unlock
the clasp I cannot undo myself.
For what should spring forth,
from that Pandora's box,
amid pain, uncertainty, shame,
would tie and bind us in a thousand knots,
I know I could not untie.
And though you would cut free,
I know you would still have one, as a reminder of me.

I remember the morning Tuesday was invented—
how gleeful we sang across the streets—
forgetting that the day after tomorrow would be Thor’s day
and that one we didn’t own, too.

I remember the bathroom stalls, the sins of Leviticus
we survived
comforting our confusion with the indulgence that God too
love man, kind.

Let the purgatory full of half good men sing about their sins
with pride and laugh at the moons and stars for being without limbs
and tongues to protest their innocence and Idontgiveadamnisms;

For I remember being fed the tenets of heterosexual history in elementary school
yet wondering why queer gods are the ones named after the planets.