Swell Zine: Poetry

After pissing away most of your twenties,
and the better part of your thirties
you're in a waiting room at the edge of forty,
expecting a health-department doctor
with bad hair and a stained white coat
to tell you how hopeless things are.

This time, though, all is well.
He doesn't believe the half-truths
anymore than you do. He can imagine
the drugs and unsafe sex
with guys whose names you never got
before they left the puke-stained dorm rooms
of the forgotten mornings after.

Your HIV test came back negative
so you've been given another pass.
You're just not sure why.
all the drugging and fucking
haven't caught up with you yet, but the way
the doctor grimaces when he says you've been lucky
makes you doubt his sincerity.

After all, how many sad faces must he see
before completely losing compassion?

Nothing but lies fill this space.
People tell you their stories, relate
how they learned so much
from past indiscretions, before they head home,
to the comfort of something they've built
on foundations lighter than air,
fables thicker than the rush-hour smog.

Seeing you again
makes me want to
spray paint
FUCK YOU
all over the walls
in our old bedroom.
Worse,
I'm considering
a collage
using the torn-off halves
of pictures we made
on vacations.
The halves with you
have become trophies,
hatred & frustration
stored in a box
filled with things to do
on rainy days.
I'll neatly cut out the heads,
fashion them
into a necklace,
which I'll use
to bind you
to the headboard,
and everything
will again be
normal.

Hope then was a humid swamp, all tangled.
Stuck together like an old Honcho
my parents found beneath my bed
five years after I moved out, on with my life.

I had left a smothering bedroom
shared with my brother into puberty,
my blended cotton sheets an unkind temple
hiding the emerging spectrum of my desire.

When I finally got him, really got him,
imagined man of my dreams in steel-toes,
he took me like a schoolboy
behind the woodshed, made me
scream for Jesus over the neighbors' sleep.

And the only consolation prize I got was a snub
when we passed on Central Avenue,
epithets of faggot and cocksucker
echoing like a migraine all over town.

Hope now is that bastard left standing
alone in the dust, on the broken road to bliss.
Another notch on my belt
as I lay down to memory his every thrust.

Brian Brown lives in Fitzgerald, Georgia. He has recently published or has work forthcoming in Velvet Mafia,Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Caveat Lector, Santa Clara Review, Keyhole, and Roanoke Review, among others. He spends far too much time on dirt roads, looking for abandoned houses and old cemeteries. The results of his ramblings may be seen at http://vanishingsouthgeorgia.wordpress.com.