Sometimes I do hear you out there,
crying.
I’ve looked in so many people’s eyes—
the gays have to hold the gaze of everyone,
as some might say is our divinely-ordained right—
and I’ve seen it all,
so many millennia and forced, lonely surrenders
turning.
I’ve looked in so many people’s eyes—
students, teachers, friends, lovers;
parents, sisters-in-law, brothers;
my husband, and both of our
abusers—
and all I see, in the end,
is so many things burning.
So much that needs learning, just like me,
when I look out back at myself in the mirror;
I know what I seem
to be to others, and to myself I am much the same—
a thirty-year old man-woman also trying not to go insane
with the grief that comes rushing away
in the universes where there is no Houndoom's Special Delivery;
in the timelines where Togepi
is never found.
In the things that were never resolved
and the wounds that always will remain.
In the ways we all weren’t enough.
In all the things that we should have had the courage to say.
In all the things that broke us up
into little, despairing warriors,
each trying to find their own way
back to a place, that because of the cruel new laws of time and space
now maybe never even existed.
Now maybe is only remembered by a poem,
a short story, a play.
I tried to find you,
in the great library of my heart, and could not;
amongst the shelves, on the four hundredth or five hundredth try,
I gave up.
It was that easy,
and also so fucking intensely hard.
You are a memory,
and I don’t know where to start
again.
Maybe that was for the very last time.
Maybe I have finally, at last,
learned how to say goodbye.
Maybe, at last,
I have earned my right
to go past my past,
and try
again, to learn,
what it means to take my life
into my own hands.
Or maybe not.
Does it matter?
Or does it depend
on what song the band is playing, right now;
it’s always the weekend in my mind and how
I remember you and I and everyone I have learned
never comes back to life
except when I cry,
and hate myself to sleep at night.
It’s in dreaming, in an empty peace,
that we learn to once more
put up an inevitable fight.
That we turn in the burning ways of what was always going to have been lost
and learn, once and finally forever wrong:
that there was never going to be an end
in sight.