I didn’t always know you wanted me.
I didn’t always believe I was so easily
waylaid by those who were lying around so freely
across my boundaries, my bastions, my balustrades:
you’re lucky that this body has always wanted to be a free city
open to all.
Open to all men willing to take a bit of a fall
and to swallow their (and
yeah, okay, I guess you could say my)
pride. To stand firm, and hard and tall
and to not let the waters of desire only reside
in the pits of
my arms, and yours.
In the places where I know you would love to burrow into, and hide.
I know this, because I have already been a shelter for so many. Alive
and dead inside; the fire burns brightly
for life.
It never goes away.
Sometimes I wish you, too, could just step forward and declare
that you were born this way.
Because that’s all it takes.
One moment in the glistening sun
and then, for the rest of your life, it is yours
to radiate.
Yours to inundate yourself with,
and to bring fair, and fresh water to the lands of those you are blessed to call kith
and kin.
Yours to build a world that, well,
just might one day end.
I don’t deal in platitudes.
I deal in hopes, and dreams, and friends.
I deal in the knowing that all of this is merely an impending sense
that you, and I, and everybody else alive
have just one life.
And that’s it.