Where else would it begin, really?
It has to start from within, a disregarding of aimless masculinity;
I mean, who else would want to smell biceps that reek of
immense and indomitable inner peace?
I am told I smell like
what remains after the state has been invited to expend its energies surveillancing someone else;
what is leftover after everything ugly has been expunged from hell;
what is undeniable, once you have finally said everything there is to tell.
It’s still true:
you don’t need to be homosexual to have a good, muscular time as well.
After all, my first best friend apparently turned out to be straight
after we french-kissed and made out for a month until late;
it’s a Kristang thing lah, to learn not to hate
the fact that it didn’t last for longer.
The fact that he had been abused by his father.
The fact that I received everything that still came after.
Indomitable inner peace;
do you know what it took to please
the last remnants of an ancient, unassailable war
that I had no part in, no reason to believe
was something that could destroy
the manliness of a cuddle, the surging rapids between?
It took me so long to realise
that a manly cuddle began with me.
It took me thirty-three visits to my therapist, and a 153-chapter treatise
to realise that a manly cuddle
is just that great of a victory.
A manly cuddle is
what it feels like
when you aren’t inside of me;
or, indeed,
yourself.
When the Maliduensa came for you so early
that everything I knew about who I was was deceived
when you crawled me scrawny, as your tongue raced over arm, and leg, and me
dozing in your arms, enjoying the company
of someone I thought was very much
ahead of me.
Instead, I have found you
still waiting for the sea.
Still incomprehensibly mean
to yourself, and to who you could be:
still thinking that to be rational is to be manly.
Still thinking that to be sorrowful
is somehow to say sorry.