The fog began to roll in,
twirling and twisting into the darkly shaded night.
The air smelled of young adulthood and
the lovehot and wild bucks and does
rolling and romping around in their
thick clouds of pheromones.
We ventured into this haze,
arms locked together and
hands intertwined.
Your warmth radiated off and
filled me with heat and
tingle-loveliness and sweet,
sweet music.
It scared me,
these new and bizarre things
that I had never felt, before.
I felt myself begin to swell up,
a bright red balloon in the dark, black night,
filled with the lighter-than-air molecules
of my newfound feelings.
Please, body,
don't you float away.
We walked in tandem--
already did we walk as one being,
one body.
It was 4 AM and
we were sauntering uptown,
stuck together like
the feathers on a bird
that had never before denied
its instinct to fly away.
I stared intently at your face,
trying to wish you away.
What about
my freedom,
my wild and untamed
boyish libido,
those future nights of painless,
faceless encounters to be blurred into
the fog of my young and wild buck-crazy
life?
Your thumb rubbed the back of my hand,
rubbed my mind and
rubbed my heart.
Your thumb rubbed
my very existence,
rubbed away the dirt and grime and
rubbed me to my very core.
I felt the ice of 47 different men
begin to melt away,
as the thing that I had sought to keep hidden
above all else
was being exposed.
That weak and
pulsing *****,
beating like a drum;
a tiny,
fragile,
little drum.
At any moment it could stop,
the tempo could change,
our arms would unlock and
our fingers drift apart.
At any moment this warmth could fade away,
could roll and sew itself into
the cold, harsh night
or lose itself in the
lonely company of the thick curtain of fog.
I looked up at the sky,
saw the light of stars I had never before noticed.
In that moment I realized,
The temporary is more beautiful
than the everlasting and the infinite.
In that moment I realized
that even though I was afraid of pain,
pain is natural,
it is inevitable.
Pain is like
the squeezing of my hand
inside the grip of another
or the heavy breathing on my neck
of a head resting on my shoulder.
It is a sign,
a message;
it says,
I am here,
I am alive.
In that moment I realized,
even if it has an end
at least it had a beginning.
Time does not exist;
the present is the only
real reality.
And really,
in that moment I realized
that taking a temporary risk
paid off,
as we never really forget someone
after we feel their hands,
their fingerprints,
after we have engrained their body heat
into our very body chemistry.
The fragility of it all,
the temporary glasshouse that
shielded these exchanges from
the harsh glares and gusts of
a world too large for itself,
made me want to cry;
the lightweight feelings and the
tippytoed carefulness
as we walked up the stairs and
into his house.
Three bears were asleep
and so we kept on walking,
laying ourselves down and
stringing our limbs together,
breathing our fallen-for-you and
forget-me-not breath
into the face of the other--
a young and inflated mirror image;
a doppelganger infatuation.
I turn my head above
and look around your room,
trying to fin the stars that
you have hidden away.
Your walls are covered in the
places you want to see,
your dreams filling up
each and every one of those
pieces of flimsy paper.
The world doesn't matter.
The roads and the streets,
the unknown and unseen locales,
they have all been mapped out by you,
seen by your heart's eye.
As we lay together,
lips interlocking and
tongues twisting together,
I present to you another place
to map out just as well.
It is a newly discovered land
full of hopes and dreams and loves and losses,
covered in pockmarks and scars and
a pale and fragile pallor.
I present it to you as a gift
and as a message,
I am here,
I am alive.
You accept it graciously,
gulp down my heart and
all of my feelings with it.


A week later and
I watch as the routes have been placed,
the forests uncovered and
the ruins and ghost towns brought
back from the haze of
historic obscurity.