Ecdysis; to pull the dead flesh from dead flesh, becoming
something entirely else. An object for understanding
desire. I wear this loneliness like a gown, ball or hospital; canvas-
tulle thrusted against a white wall, what else could I have been?
Oh, what possibilities loneliness might hold if we let it. Around me,
boys gawk and barrel at a portrait of two men fucking and
is there anything else to learn from this other than that intimacy
can only equate to violence? I watch in anger while I am wrapped
in the arms of a beloved that refuses to pull their face from
the lily-threaded trees. In this, I understand the opposite to be true;
violence can also equate to intimacy. In another life, maybe we pull ourselves
naked in this shag-still fauna. Instead of fishnets, you dawn a row of fur
lining your thighs. You wear me like this sickly gown; this loneliness. I allow it
this time. You fuck me on that pier while a photographer catches the light
of my teeth and we hang in an art gallery for those boys that cannot help
but laugh, I am a canary wings pinned to a wall, I am gorgeous in that silk
slip. Some nights I am just a boy in how I snicker foolishly at loneliness.
But when the other boys laugh, too, my anger spills out like a bucket
of marbles and it is funny, how we assign want. I want to be so mad
at them, for understanding their hurt so well. Your unconcern should
concern me, how when we kiss and a crow flies from my mouth to die
at our feet. Who are we here? Divided granite, you love me but not enough
to show your face to the camera’s hungry lens. I fold under you like the boy
I am supposed to be. Unborrowed but free from the grip loneliness
rattles around our necks. This has never been about loneliness—the body
sheds the touch it craves, it could always survive without. My loneliness
is not about absence, I have always had you for that.