My surrogate mother, while picking her nose
Undressed me with her eyes, at my sister’s funeral
Until I was stripped bare as a stick figure
Surfing the waves of middle class realism
A gay boy from the upper west side
Bringing little darlings home
So they can dazzle
Like she dazzled
Serving as projective correlatives
To my father’s studies
     Rattlesnaking through the house,
        a Kaddish follows each Adonis out
The door
    Leaving me sniffing mellow pavements
  Hunchbacked and horny
        Each boy on each date and each kiss
  Is saved on my menagerie shelf
But I don’t sit crippled, tending to
  Ornamental twinkles in a house
    On the upper west side of a declining
    Metropolis, where the arbitrary still
            lilts and
                tilts
       like Cubist
            jazz
     but I will not
snap, my eye tugging of war with
Big sis. She always wins
  Yanks off the skin, leaving my shaft
     bare

No boy is worth suffering through a funeral for
Not even a sea of boys, not even a pinky ring
Not even an orange orangutan boy in a loincloth

By the way, this was all just an
Obstacle course to find my dead sister

I win. Do you?

                Ryan, you are the last youngster
                To be puffed up to a prince
                In my grubby eyes
                But if I could take it all back
                And hide in the twilight of poetic
                  Fancy, I would
                I would curl pre-fetal pre-glint
                Avoiding the ice cold
                Wrath of hormonal rushes
                That makes me long for the son
                    A son, any son

Now I’m just a stick figure blinded by tinsel

Much more though I try to be, more than just
Fixation—bitterly, reflexively attuned to my
Surrogate mother as she looks at me while I
Trill through heart encrusted mournful belting
At the site of ignition and valor, oft made in
To mist (his mist), and so I wander hazy
To the broken tip of our romantic needle,
Scaffolded but proud, until at last Memory yields
And the boy falls into