Categories
Gay Health Love Poem Queer

Pink Pig

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1.

It is dawn again. Dawn in the desert. The smell of the earth and the dew. The sounds of the chirruping birds.

The pervasive silence of the long black night coming to an end.

My night blindness is getting worse. I sat on my spectacles so am guessing, largely… where the keys are.

The days get hotter and hotter. The sun beating down relentlessly. The lawn toasting, the dogs roasting, the mountain tightens around us as it bakes.

Hot days in Dorset/ hot days in Malibu. Hot days on the sleepy ocean, lapping around me.

Coffee, editing, read the daily news. It sure looks bad in Syria.

We cruise down to the beach and play in the surf. We are tangled at night in the white linen sheets. We read side by side in silence. A familiar smell, a beating heart, the man I want but do not need.

He asks what we are. Nothing. We are nothing, I say. He struggles with ‘what it means’ to love another man.

My struggle is over. I am too old to give love a second chance.

He sees me thinking. He will read this and tell me to talk to him as if talking will solve everything. Just shut up and make love to me. Stop asking me what it means. Don’t expect me to know anything. Work it out yourself.

I don’t really care.

For all the terrible, meaningless cruelty I am still besotted with him. And, like the parent of a missing child, I wonder daily about his safety. Even though he is undeserving of my worry and considers my concern an intrusion..

I continue to fret about him, however violently I have tried to expunge the memory.

2.

I am mostly happy. I know you don’t believe me. I know that you think I am lying to you about my happiness.

Well, if you could see me… if you were the one laying beside me… you would understand.

Island Wall. The tiny cottage there. It was enough. It was perfect.

Now I lay my head down and it is enough.

Perhaps, you say, you could be happier? How much happier?

Facelifts, apparently, make women happier.

Then I realize that you are confusing your own thoughts about getting older with what you think happiness is. How can anyone be that old and be happy? How can anyone have so little and be happy?

Then, you try convincing me that I should want to be young again. Forgetting, of course, that I was never young. Always old. Always.

I have a spectacular ability to get on with what I have and be happy with it.

I don’t want more. Even in the jail. I found comfort. I found solace.

So, you think I am unhappy because you do not know what happiness is.

Could you imagine a happy person killing themselves? I could.

Come death.

3.

I had another dream about the DA. This time my thumb was in her mouth. She was sucking my thumb. Pressed down on her tongue. Like a calf. Her big brown eyes looking up at me.

Whenever I dream about her, her cheap gold jewelry tinkles like ice cubes in a crystal glass.

4.

I am writing my screenplay. Finishing it. I am enjoying a social life. I let the man beside me massage my neck.

I understand that I am in love with struggle. Struggle is sustenance.  It feeds me everything I need to live. I am alive when I fight to survive. I am alive when I feel myself emerge victorious. Even though you could not imagine what I experience as victory.

I dream that I am walking by my primary school in Whitstable. The black, tarmac playground is always empty. The lawn is green. The classrooms, I assume, are full.

I remember the boy who ate coal, the butcher’s son. He looked like a pink pig. Fat, pink, bespectacled. He drowned you know. You knew that… didn’t you? When he couldn’t take it anymore.

5.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives.

Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea.

And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

Categories
Love

Tumblr

I am obsessed with my Tumblr account.

Sitting with 12 year old Hannah learning how to do it properly.

Sitting up all night searching for images, videos, quotes from a long life.

Constructing a narrative where all events harmonize.   Where color and texture blend from one image to another.  Telling public and private stories simultaneously.

As for the rest?  My other life?

I had tea with a producer on Friday ostensibly to talk about my new film…then unexpectedly he asked me to read a script which they are looking for a director.

It arrived immediately and it is beautiful.  It will take me to Europe for a year.  To Italy.

I drove back up the 10…happy, joyous and free.  Perhaps the hell of the last two years is truly coming to an end?

Dinner in Venice, then bumped into my ‘friend with benefits’.  He said, although drunk, that he was embarrassed to introduce me to his friends because I am so much older.  I told him that was like me being embarrassed by his being a jew or gay…I walked away.  He’s a kid.  What do I expect?

He needs to learn to own his own life.

Today it’s lunch on the beach with British friends then tomorrow a magazine editor friend of mine from NYC is here.

I explained to Robby why I was feeling so optimistic, hours before the script was mentioned.  Looking out over LA from the 13th floor.

I explained why seeing the man I once loved in love was so reassuring.

To be excluded from the life of one for whom I had been so instrumental…had driven me insane.

The emotional investment in another, even when that relationship changes into something else…well…one is always looking to recoup.

The dividend…was to see him happy.  I saw irrefutable evidence that all our hard and painful, beautiful and passionate time together…was worth it.

I don’t need, nor do I deserve to have the enduring love of another to make me happy…all I needed to know was that he, he who I love…was loved.

It is very simple to me…though confusing for most.

My ‘failed relationship’ has meaning now.  A context.

During the past two years I have written so often about finding peace.  Peace and understanding.  This is it!  I announced grandly…this is the peace I have been searching for!  Well, I was wrong.

It was merely an illusion.  A false hope.  The glaring eyes of many storms…a momentary peace…which I mistakenly assumed would last.  The 100 foot waves continued to break over the bow and I was lost again.

Seeing those two men pressed together, harmonious, happy…well…who couldn’t want for them what I was never able to achieve?

I know what you think…that I deserve what I get, that I am not very nice, that I have been very cruel.  Well, it’s true.  I have been cruel and mean but I don’t think it was anything other than necessary for us to go through what we went through.

The only people, as I have written before who are deserving of my apology…are his parents and sister who I demanded into our violent storm, who I insulted and maligned.

For that I am truly sorry.

I have no idea, ultimately, if he intended for me specifically to see those things but he must have known.  Wether he intended to try making me jealous..well..that’s another consideration and we’ll leave it at that.

What I have learned these past few years is that (in a quieter less public way) so many men and women are tortured by love…in and out of love.  Choosing inappropriate partners, chasing hopeless dreams.

Sadly, there is no cure for curiosity.

Categories
Rant

Blood, Shit and Cum

Woke at the usual time.

Nothing unusual about the rain, the gray sky, the walk around the park.   Empty, wet streets.  Nothing unusual.  The Little Dog did what he was meant to do.  He was subdued.   I am perfectly sure that the leash must have communicated my apprehension.  Today is the day.

The first time in 10 months since I last laid eyes on him.

Perhaps we can both solve something today?

Last night I met Zack for dinner.  His friend Pony joined us for desert.  We explored a little night life after.  Ended up at some club on 21st and 5th.

A very tiny, very drunk man approached me and said, “You can fuck me but I don’t want to end up in your blog.”

I reassured him that he would never appear in either my bed or my blog.

Mike Tyson once told a bunch of men I was hanging out with that a sexual encounter only really meant something when the sheets were covered in shit, blood and cum.

He really said that.

I am going to get a tee-shirt made with that Tyson inspired mantra printed on it.  Blood, Shit and Cum.

Categories
Dogs Gay Love

i Can’t Help You

Stone

All day the Little Dog has been sick.   He is listless and miserable, his little black nose hot and dry.   I checked his gums but they seem ok.  I get scared that he might die.   The past few months would have been utterly unbearable without him.

At about 7.30 he perked up and has been right as rain ever since.  Leaping all over Eric when he arrived for hastily put together dinner.

He is snuggling in my lap as I write.

I think about the darling big dog.  My darling big dog, I miss her more than I ever did.   I still have daily, violent memories of her broken, bloody body.  Searing into my mind.    Replaying the last few moments of her life before that evil truck scraped her across the road.

My fingers angrily bang the letters of those words onto the page.

I CAN’T HELP YOU.

I blame the man driving the truck.  He did it on purpose.  He didn’t stop.  Bastard.

At moments like this I soothe myself with memories of home.  I think a great deal of England-green and pleasant land.  The Kent countryside, the buses to Canterbury, Georgina, The Goods Shed, etc. etc., I nightly drive through Clowes Wood in my semi conscious state..naked..shameless.

I remember a recurring nightmare:  I am a young boy naked in the schoolyard.  I have no idea where my clothes are or where I lost them.   I hide behind the half door in the toilets as the other children are called to class.  I stand naked in the schoolyard covering myself, the cold wind whipping grit into my eyes.  The other children sitting warm inside at their desks.

Last night as he was with me in my bed I lay thinking of how I might get home safely.  How can I get back home?  For all that raucous, interminable thinking we slept soundly.

I’ve not written a word these past few days.  Full moon blues I call it.   I lost interest in my blog as things calmed down with my (ex?) and my new friend holidayed in Italy.

I had to deal with a moving traffic violation issue that meant going to the Superior Court twice this week.  The judge was very fair and funny but going through a stop sign still cost me $550.  I have opted for community service.  The art auction last Sunday seemed to vindicate my ability to pick the winners.  Things sold mostly at the upper end of the estimate.  I bought a beautiful candle stick by a potter whose name I have forgotten.

Prevaricating.  Stifled.  Tongue-tied.

The point is:  I can’t really write down any of my true feelings.  I am in shut down mode.  I can’t do anything, move anywhere, release myself..rant or rave.  The malaise seems to affect every area of my life.

After the headiness of New York I’ve fallen into a sharp decline, my confidence at an all time low.    Dinner with friends last weekend I simply couldn’t hold my head up, my libido, my enthusiasm, my recall deserting me.  She was a very cool next generation producer.  CAA agents greeting her at our table.  Hugs and kisses.  Fast track.

I say to myself, “I am on my own with no one to focus on, no one to say that I love.”    It feels like a terrible waste.   I had some real hope!  Hope that I could travel the world with a man I was excited by.  How those dreams crumble into dust.  I am fractured by time and distance.  I am in the wrong city, in the wrong country, on the wrong fucking planet.  I am desperate for a change of circumstance.

The road that leads to the Malibu house is weeks from being repaired.  It maybe the very metaphor I am looking for.  The road to the house is being repaired so I can escape my verdant prison.   Yet every day I do my best to make it more like paradise.

I want to write about The Great BP Catastrophe but I can’t.  I want to write about anything other than me but each time I begin I am stopped by something inescapable.  I just don’t care. I don’t care about anything.  I am exhausted..spent.

Beaten by the sheer force of inequity:

BP, miserable pictures of delicate Pelican eggs smeared with crude oil.  The watered down banking regulations that caused Wall Street a collective sigh of relief. Congress about to pass an additional $32 billion to pay for war in Afghanistan yet it struggling to justify a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year.

What kind of country are we?

Categories
Rant

Comfort Inn

East 10th St,  New York City 2010 again.  The little dog and I traversed the city (east/west) three times today.  It makes us very happy.  My feet hurt.  The little dog is curled up, fast asleep, beside me.   I flew out of LAX yesterday afternoon, arrived late at JFK and miserably stayed at the JFK Comfort Inn as amazingly could not find a single room in any hotel near to where I usually stay in NYC, in fact, there wasn’t a room anywhere in Manhattan less than $1, 800 a night.

The Comfort Inn is a bit of a misnomer as it isn’t very comfortable nor is it ’in’.   My room stank of old cigarettes and feet.  Even the little dog was suspicious of the bed and refused to get under the covers.  There was a $250 fine for smuggling animals into the rooms apparently.

Thank God we didn’t know.

When I arrived I was warned not to leave the hotel because it was dangerous.  Hmmm.

“Is this the hood?”  I asked innocently.

All week I received evocative, beautiful letters from Italy, descriptive, sexy and exciting.  I await his return with delicious anticipation.   I will be back in LA ready to be there fully for him.

It delights me!  Everyday I get his beautiful loving emails. All this comfort and joy from a man who loves me and is not ashamed to say the words: I LOVE YOU.  He is sure to tell me that he loves me, to make sure that I understand what this means.  That it means something.

I came to NYC to help celebrate the birthday of a man who said he didn’t have anything to do.  Now, apparently, he is sick and unable to leave his house so it looks like I am in NYC spending money needlessly.   Call me foolish, call me an idiot tell me that I shouldn’t have made the effort!   Remind me once again; wagging your fat pink finger at me ‘what did you expect?’.

The following morning I took the subway from The Comfort Inn into the West Village where I met J&J for lunch.   It seems that VH1 is very well watched by the residents of Queens as once on the Subway I was stared at, talked about and asked for autographs.  Once up on the Soho House roof we ate an emotional lunch due to my realizing that if my friend had known he was sick the morning I flew here why didn’t he just let me know?

So, there I am on the roof of Soho House telling my best friends that I am a fucking idiot and hating myself more than any one of you could ever hate me.

I was pleased to have two of my closest friends in town.  I couldn’t actually eat my lunch because I was so ‘emotional’ and a ‘drama queen’.    I am so sick of being treated like an idiot by a man who obviously has no respect for me and considers me some kind of sappy pushover.

Oh fuck it.  I can’t be bothered to work it out.  Anyway, he got what he wanted-I am now disengaged at a much deeper level than I was before.  Totally.  It is hard not to feel like I have been used.   Needless to say my gesture of friendly goodwill has massively backfired.  Some things are just not meant to be.

That all said of course, I am happy to be home in NYC and immediately lose weight pounding the streets.  It is wonderful to be back in the city.  Wonderful to have all those faces to gaze, everyone is so handsome.  Windows to stare into, the anticipation of rain, city life at my fingertips.

The little dog loves NYC and we were up at 5.30am in Tompkins Square Park where we saw a feral cat and NO RATS.   He fixated on squirrels and I on the vagaries of this mad and exotic city.

Back at home in the East Village now.  Dan and I are catching up.

Dinner at Prune last night, I ate the mussels in lobster broth.  Delicious.

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