Temptation of the Rope

The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking about him, all of twenty & gay & more free than any of us might ever be, & this is one way of telling the story, another one is aphorism or threat: blood on my knife or blood on my dick, which is to say that surviving that young & beautiful and willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing that there is always something worth risking doom. There is no reason for me to think of him now, especially with the football player’s hanging body eclipsing another prison cell, except, maybe the kid whose name I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered something the dead man’s singing legs could never, how not to abandon the body’s weight, & how to make the body expand, to balloon, to keep becoming, until even the danger could not swallow you. One day I watched him, full of fear for my own fragility & wondered how he dared own so much of himself, openly. For all I know every minute in those cells was safe for the kid whose name I cannot recall. But how can a man ever be safe like that, when you are so beautiful the straight ones believe it & want to talk to you as if they love you and want you to dare them to believe some things in this world must be far too lovely to ever be broken.