It's the story of my life: minus the big budget close-ups, plus a film director unsure of my fate, minus a season among sheep, plus mountains looking like saddles for my true love to ride, minus extras with tire irons, minus awards, but the yes of two men becoming one, the sí of kissing far from angels (how Blakean), plus Mormon underwear stripteases, Sundays wearing vodka haloes, plus nights spent on the floor and somehow not stepped upon by God, plus exorcisms and cold rivers, whispers in Spanish from our missions, plus secret sleepwalking into each other's doubts, free to quote Wilde, plus a plan to escape America, but it's the exact story of my life with my cowboy, minus the sense of an impending Patmos, that franchise of whispers and wild kisses, minus the script (we were our best scriptures), we the scarred ghosts wearing landscape's honesty, photogenic Adam's Apples, designer sorrow, minus talk show rodeos, paparazzi round-ups, politically-correct high fives, minus the nightmares of winged horses with hooves striking rocks to start fires, plus slow motion nights on Speed, education and library cards, the Spanish of my skin, plus a belief in doom, nights bedding the moon, two men without spin doctors, plus an unedited nakedness, joy rides in beds offering amnesty for the crime of being, plus our Tijuana plans for a destiny makeover, our nights as free verse Rimbauds in cowboy boots, plus vaqueros keeping quiet about the specifics that become the story of my life, plus Judgment Day drinking games: showing God just Brokeback Mountain to explain myself, minus the editing, each moment as Love's monument and God's cameo, in my image, in my imagination, in my nation while I and my cowboy are silent having to learned to speak wind, wind from nowhere, wind with news of home, of our entangled shadows seeking us with the plus and the minus of having form, and we ride away from the cosmic to the specifics of long nights without stars with clenched fists, us undressed and wondering what it feels like to become fiction.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.