Moving your shoulder blades, hard and immobilized like tectonic plates, until the warmth of my hands gently coaxes the muscles to release you, and then they move with the slow assuredness of the continental drift. You wake me with your arms around me tight and we say the secretive, early morning improvised devotional lover’s song.
“I exist so that when you touch me, I will feel it.”
“You are what love looks like.”
Falling asleep again, I feel myself chasing your body until we unwittingly reach the precipice of the bed, about to fall off the cliff onto the floor, until the vertigo wakes me in the nick of time. I crawl over onto the other side of you, and chase you once more, as the moon follows the earth across the sky, locked in a gravitational embrace. Sometimes I am the moon, cold, small, dark, with craters and assorted footprints, yet luminous and mysterious. Sometimes I am the earth, all the oceans and the continents and the air and all that is living there in and around it, all the things we know to be true and false. You are the earth and the moon and then sometimes the sun, hot and too painfully bright and beautiful to look at, I must look at you through a pinhole in a shoebox. Your rays sustain me, grow my fields and flowers, illuminate and reward me with heat and glorious golden light, and then you burn me, with this ecstatic fire that destroys everything inside me, only to have built me back up again by morning. The eclipses where we do not meet, and we are far away from each other, feel like the oddity that they are in nature, and therefore as natural as nature itself, because nature is all about oddity, nonconformity, change, growth, destruction, death, life, love, hate.
This lover’s musings could be those of any or all who love or have loved. They could be a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, two people who are somewhere transcendent of both.
Love has not a gender signifying its validity, nor does love have any discretion on whom it might choose to bestow its gifts. Love is and that is all. To love and to be loved in return is what I consider to be life’s greatest joy, and this can take place a million times a day or not once in many lifetimes. Love only asks that you choose it.
In my youth, I was taught by those who were persecuted because of the way that they love: young homosexual men who had traveled long and far to the promised land of gays, our queer Shambala, mystical and mythical San Francisco, to appreciate love in all of its forms, that to love in the ways that others would condemn you, there must be a reverence for the stolen kisses, the furtive looks that meant everything and then nothing. The attention paid to the moments of touch that would leave an impression of the body, would repay the lover a hefty return and live on in the memory, because if they say that it is wrong to love who you love, it is wrong to love how you love, sometimes the dreams of lovers past are all you have to live on, which will not be enough to sustain you, until you learn to live in all time, that walking past, present and future is your path, at least until the world catches up to us, and learns to honor love as it should be.
I had/have/will have many lovers, and therefore I have a life that throbs with drama and chaos, but then again, I cannot have it any other way. The way that life is mapped out for me, and the fact that love has chosen me to represent it in its countless aspects, allow me the freedom to maneuver my heart along treacherous, unpaved roads and emerge loved and loving still, and all the more. To truly love, one must be in a state of constant awe and reverie, armed with the knowledge there is nothing in the world that can substitute for it. If you cannot understand what I am talking about, I hope that one day you will, that love is like the air, moon, sky, sun, earth, water – it is elemental, and once you experience it, thereafter you are baptized and a dance partner for another in the never ending pas de deux of life, and I pray that your card will forever be filled with names beloved.
After having said this, fuck that guy in Wyoming, Fred Phelps, who is planning a monument commemorating the death of Matthew Sheperd. The monstrosity, visualized by the full time religious fanatic and unbelievable asshole Phelps, in granite or marble (inconsistently tasteful and pricey for a sculpture dedicated to hatred – sending a mixed message to artisans and masons everywhere, as good taste and the added expenses attached to luxury materials are usually attributed to the commemoration of love, and so the fact that he has the medium already picked out makes him ironically ‘faggy’ – ha ha – fuck you Fred Phelps – have you considered what font you will use? Not Helvetica. Too butch for you, you piece of shit. And if it wasn’t clear before, fuck you – I mean it – seriously fuck you), is theoretically going to be placed near the monument of the ten commandments already placed in a park in Casper, Wyoming, Sheperd’s hometown, and the possibility that this may not be something that the community can stop is such an affront to love and the sensibilities of humanity, compassion, understanding and equality, as well as the basic American stance of separation of church and state that we might as just make the entire park dedicated to the celebration of ignorance and blind hatred.
Prejudice Park needs to be erected. Why stop at a monument? Why must you limit your vision for a hate filled, prejudiced, homophobic, stupid and mad America Fred? Why not take it all the way? There could be an entire theme park, a SIX FAGS if you will, that will be dedicated to the abolishment and destruction of all those who don’t live their lives by the idiotic ideology of Fred Fuck Phelps. We can enter the park by taking a ride through the HOMO HAUNTED MANSION, where you see gay men holding hands, playing footsie under the table at expensive restaurants, trying to decide on garlic press options at Williams and Sonoma, and then abomination of abominations – raising children in a loving home without fear or judgment, but instead understanding and compassion and being good parents. From there, it is a hop skip and a hate crime away from the infamous roller coaster, the AIDS-ERATOR, a thrill kill ride where you are taken from 0-60 mph in less than a second, as the rails replicate the basic structure of the HIV virus and trace its journey in ups and downs that no one can predict, twist you up down around and in so many circles that you won’t know how compromised your immune system is as the ride takes you from finding the presence of the virus to full blown AIDS in less than a minute flat. Definitely an E-ticket for the T-cell conscious.
Fuck you Fred Phelps.
Don’t forget to visit HOMOHATERZ HUT, where you can buy mugs with the images of famous and influential homophobes like Hitler, Pat Robertson and the entire Moral Majority Posse – collect ’em all! – as well as numerous collectibles of bigots throughout history. you can find quilted pot holders with needlepoint swastikas, so convenient when using the oven! KKK salt and pepper shakers – the pepper shaker has no holes – hooray – no black pepper! – just white salt! – makes a fabulous gift for the Grand Wizard who has everything! Rope! Trees that will grow and magically bear strange fruit! Mousepads of the countless images of mass graves filled with the innocent dead Jewish people from WWII! Yay!!! Finally, knick knacks for the discriminating discriminator! All under one roof!
Fuck you Fred. Phelps. Fuck. You. Die. Die horribly, painfully, incomprehensibly, unbearably. Die and die soon. Die the death you deserve, and let God sort you out. Fuck you. I hate you. I fucking fucking fucking hate you.