At a party—what irony.
But there’s no morbidity, this time
it’s simple: Sick Boy trudges over.
Initiates talk with
Cute Boy who says, without saying:
All my senses are bottomless pits;
their floors are infinity. Mouths: they eat
whole existences: body, self, and personality.
Now, what do you have to give?
& Sick Boy replies, without saying:
I have nothing to give.
What self, what body have I to offer you
to eat that wasn’t birthed diseased,
grown diseased amidst disease,
made compliant, having edged
finality perpetually, been schooled
by lack and worry? Untethered.
What self that doesn’t sway,
give way, to the winds
of circumstance, to chance,
the wills of the world?
Sick Boy invites Cute Boy over
without imposing: Will you lie amidst
(my) bedsheets of decay? Will you
come dance (with me) at the doors
to the shrines of (my) death?
Will you walk into me?
And what will you eat? What can I give?
& Cute Boy smiles.
It’s nice to meet you too, he says.
The exchange is like the binaries
of a phone; abstracted away
by illusory technical instruments
of chance, circumstance, desire,
and conversation, with some party
alcohol in the system.
No one really hears the other,
but by body memory, they know.
It is a longing to fill—be filled,
have filled. A reaching
for the final answer that, when reached
in the endless bottom of its cave-pit,
where you may only meet it standing,
by falling, says, without saying:
There’s no answer—the answer is
so simple, why do you bother to ask?
The boys talk a while,
get to know each other
without getting to know each other.
They promise to converse after.
& their talk goes nowhere, a falling
question; it fades away,
into the finality of infinity.
