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