/DAY 29/
YOU WAKE UP LATE
FEEL YOUR HEART BEGIN TO WORK

In Saigon, I have this place I take my bitches. Ok, I don’t talk like that. Excuse me, all a byproduct of keeping everyone 7 arms and a head turned away from intimacy. Give me the chance and it’ll be 1700 wingspans in seconds pushing you away. I run. I always run. Start again. Be kind of a human. It’s just a wall within you: you can tear it down. All right. Breathing and shit. Deuxième essai: In Saigon, I have this place I take my men. In a city of 9 million people, it’s really just my spot. I don’t know if anyone knows how to get up there. I sincerely doubt anyone but danger sluts know how to. You have to bypass security to sneak up stairs next to an abandoned gay bar in Quận 1. Walk up less than 76 steps to stroll across a deserted diner dotted with dining tables in damn near total darkness to find the door that leads you to the porch that looks down at downtown where I can press you against a wall and kiss you and don’t ever remember I’m damaged. And if your touch doesn’t make me dance away from your hand on my jeans down the stairs and across Dong Khoi street without you, I might take you up the fire escape to climb on the roof and lay there with me to the sound of syncopated motorbike horns simulating ocean waves, my heart that won’t calm the fuck down and the rhythm of your hips grinding up on mine.

I PULLED MY SHIRT OFF AND
TRIED TO EXPLAIN I’D ALL BUT GIVEN UP ON LOVE

In rainy season, monsoons make the aluminum a rusty rugburn on the small of your back. I know this. Ruined so many good tops that way. And so I take off my shirt and tell you how I’ve given up on love. I’ve got game, but like only for the next 37 minutes or so. And everyone’s ok with that. People don’t really like me, but they don’t really mind being in me. To a majority of men, I’m so extra. My mind moves too fast. Doesn’t zig or move out of the way of a good thought or traffic. I explode inebriated expectations over cocktails in some dive bar with the collocations that can’t keep from tumbling out the tip of my adventurous tongue. And it’s annoying to try and take all my world in when you want a one way ticket to someone’s taint, but that’s me. I want to romance the world with vivacious vignettes much like you want to kiss my neck to have a muddled memory to spank bank to next Monday. And if you can avoid calling me weird between the first whiskey and the way towards the exit door, you can nearly ensure your way to a one night stand with a kind of human under stars while people in the nearby Sheraton look down on us.

I’M PULLED AWAY, I SEE ANOTHER OF MYSELF
WHO’S FOUND TRUE LOVE AND HAPPINESS
AND WAKING UP WITH SUNLIGHT ACROSS MY ROOM

It’s been 9 years since I’ve taken anyone actually home to my bed. Hotels, yes. Bathhouses, you betcha. My Saigon spot, well we know the answer. And I don’t think that I’m unloveable except that I do. Maybe people don’t see me. I broke myself down to be seen. I broke me down and bungled the put back back together like I was a bookcase you got at IKEA sans picture tutorial. And I know you can look it up online or ask someone how to spatially construct all the bones and shelves your memories and heart sit on but I just hot glued it all together and prayed for the best. And I was ok with that, that’d no one’d see me except to gawk and comment on all the awkwardness of me because it gave me all the bravado I needed to just bolt from every boy who laid his lips on me and then made me feel like I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with the homo sapiens. Was all good, until I was up there with a guy from Barcelona and it’d been three hours and he hadn’t made me feel seperate. Or as other. And he slipped his hand in mine and I was shook.

TWO BOYS, ONE TO KISS YOUR NECK
AND ONE TO BRING YOU BREAKFAST

And I thought of sitting on the edge of my bed reading the New Yorker. And he was there, basking in a chair in his underwear with sunlight strewn across his chest, all bucolic and shit at how I was belly-laughing at the sarcasm within those magazine pages. And I’d share a personal essay that’d given me life and he’d break into a debate with me that’d reaffirm I wasn’t alone in the way that I thought. And then he’d bring himself over to me and cut away all the nervousness breaking bad in my brain with collocations he’d come up with while inspired by my bellybutton and it’s treasure trail. He’d be two boys: one to kiss my neck and one to bring me breakfast when you’re sore from the night before. I was brought into this fantasy. I was. I let myself go there. My face was all dreamy and expressive with the damn end of a juicy era of me he’d asked to hear about dripping down out my mouth. And I looked at him and I could see his confidence not catching a break like he didn’t know how to handle me anymore or felt initimidated. I watched and braced for the next two words. I knew them. I did. I’d let myself believe they weren’t coming. He put his lips near my eardrum and beat me with ‘You’re weird.’ Damn.

TELLING ME SOMETHING OR NOTHING
NEVER THE ONE THING I DON’T WANNA HEAR

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