riding past the Barn

When we finally pulled our hips apart

Opened the great door naked and wide

To a summer night that had stumbled into fall

it was the streetlamps speaking

A language I recognized and the friendly bubbles of pavement

Of my home which sung something sweet and it was as if your lips had not left my shoulder and what we thought must grindingly come to a stuttering halt at the end of the line

Continued on into the something beyond what we know

When , after id shown you the parts of me I cannot control

And you laughed at them and their beastliness

And cupped their cheeks and stroked their hair, when

You showed the way to your special places where I was not the first

But where we both felt discovered and discovering there for a moment,

And When the candle was out , when the night whimpered and purred

And when we played the Pandora jazz station because I could not make love to hip hop, when your eyes came in and out and the fear played itself flickeringly there,

When I watched and asked you to look at me as you came, and when we finally reclaimed our separate parts beautified and shining and touched

There was a saxophone playing in the street

I biked on towards home

He was outside the bar where I would be sitting drinking into something

Were you not in my life

And I stopped

And he kept on

“ hey daddy—thank you”

pierced nose and bright eyes

I whooped and rode

wired across my limbs.

And thrumming in my blood

You and your looks and your addiction

Played out

And tonight I am alive to it all