GAY PRIDE
ROBERT GROSS
In lieu of the festivities I lay out twenty dollars for a séance.
I’ve sucked a lot of cock and had my share of deathwatch but
don’t wear rainbow. It’s good we’ve made this Technicolor progress, even so . . .
There’s still the black-and-white of Kansas and Mabuse. Norman Bates.
I hide out in a shuttered upstairs room with strangers, two electric candles
and a silver megaphone in the center of a shadowed circle
Hoping for instruction from one of my mustached lovers
the raging atheist with HIV and a passion for Strauss and Mahler
the gentle theosophist who smoked himself into kama-loka and beyond
The medium (is she Swedish?) tells me my parents are together
after decades apart, radiant and joyous, golden figurines
who think I should try woodworking, make simple toys for kids.
The fireworks are popping off, a sequined noisy barrage
across the river. A lot of glittered g-strings and t-shirts reading
Gay is the new straight. Whatever. Lots of pretty boys out, even so . . .
White garbage bags piled up shoulder’s height on Chelsea corners,
stinking refuse of emancipation. Policemen wave me through
the barricade. Do I resemble one of them, the revelers, or am I just
Too old, still too much in mourning to get down and boogie big time
in praise of doing what I could—the played-out veteran of some border
skirmishes—not enough to be a hero but too much to go back home?
The bachelor at the bar, a beer in his left hand, mojito in his right,
confides These Chinese girls at Pride are so damn hot. I want to fuck them all.
I pay cash for my Shiraz, sprint upstairs to my single, jerk off, joyless,
Imagining no one. Drift into Geppetto reverie: what’s a real boy like?
Blue-haired fairy, fox, and cat? High school girls with home-made
posters, gym rats holding hands? One helluva celebration, even so . . .