A longer work day, ahead, with less sleep,
longer work days ahead, watching, too,
more TV. What, in the end, will I keep
to myself, have to myself, forced to make do?
Pinched nerve in my neck, living in pain,
nothing to be done about it—here’s
the drumming of my clock, breathe, I abstain,
mindful breath but a rapping in arrears,
demanding, i think, to be let in. The gay
man inside me is backed into a corner—
forced, by myself, to deliver the day,
a day of reckoning for what we were,
and might have been, by now, if things had
gone differently. But I can’t change the time,
and the environment, from which the bad
in me would spring, subject to Satan’s crime,
pride, wanting people to believe in me.
Believe in something greater than this rhyme,
the person, yet, that I am becoming, free
to do whatever I want, with the time
I have left—twenty years or so, then I’ll
be too old to believe that I am young,
even if I had someone, all the while,
strapped to my arm. The hour, friend, has rung,
and I’m left wanting, with nothing to do
but feel the feelings that keep me awake,
until, God help me, I should make it through—
living, as a bisexual, for my sake,
with nothing hidden from my parents, my
friends, from unknown women, and unknown men.
It seems that man would prefer that I
keep all this to myself, but it would spill, then,
as something else, arrogance and anger,
hate and conceit. It is not my duty,
or my problem, if others should prefer
a heterosexual son or a friend,
fitting, perfectly, in the space they allot,
a world view, like mine, that some might say
is behind the times; but the story I bought
belongs to the future—not straight, not gay,
and everything in between. I’ll never marry,
or, if I do, then I’ll have reinvented
what it means, to me, and others, to be free.
Living as a stranger to myself, ahead
of myself, and, yet, falling behind. I
must play catch-up now, and pay His price—
that’s why I can’t sleep, this life I defy
will make me or ruin me. I entice
myself, when I can, doing my best to
let Him in, and the desire He’s denied.
Too much, too fast, but it’s already too
late to slow things down—how I tried
to protect myself from the outside, but it
seems I was fooling myself, thinking that
I had something to hide. Take the gambit,
then, and follow Him to where He’s at,
breathing, gently, as his heart races past.
Slow the world down, let me sleep, but I
can do even more—the die was cast,
long ago, when I was born, to hear His cry,
from the cross, the advent of that next
step, from those that cannot adapt to those
that pay, now, seemingly oversexed:
Why must I suffer, still, in passion’s throes?