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6.
One day, after you hadn’t come around for several days, I wanted to see you, and went to the place where you work; a row of huge greenhouses. I peeked inside one and saw long tables covered with potted shrubs. Someone snuck up behind me and asked me if I needed help. I didn’t know where to look for you, or if you were there, so I asked. They went to fetch you. I remembered our role-play and smiled to myself. You really are a gardener. We had this argument before and it embarrasses you: you tell me I’m mistaken; you are a professional landscaper: gardeners dig holes and stick things into them. “Isn’t that what you do to me,” I say. You ignore me and reaffirm that landscapers create new spaces; “Ooh,” I say. But when I showed up at the place where you work, you didn’t want to see me there. When you find out I’m there, you shove me around to the back of the greenhouse, back where the young trees are kept in neat parallel rows, their root balls wrapped in burlap ready for transplanting to create those new spaces. You interrogate me: who did I see, what did I say? “Nothing,” I say. When I try to put my arms around you, you push me away, telling me not to touch you. You tell me we have committed a grave sin. You make me go away telling me you don’t want to see me again. You are ashamed of me. I’ve never seen you get this piously self-righteous before, and I’m hurt. You are angry with me. If you keep this up, one of these days you will snap; you will probably stab or strangle me. I don’t care. I don’t want to give up on you. That is how you will release the self-hatred that your lord has instilled in you. Despite all your indignation, you don’t stay away; you come to me.
7.
You come to me, pounding on my apartment door. I can tell you are upset by your refusal to look me in the face; I know this even before you tell me we should pray for forgiveness. I snort and laugh at you, but you are serious. Your conscious is guilty. I walk away from you, but you slam the door, grab me, and twist my arm behind my back. Then shoved me to the floor. So, you had me on my knees. I wasn’t going to pray. You let go and knelt with me and gave me a bewildered look. You were about to cry. I put my hands on your shoulders; you start to pull away but don’t. You tell me the Church says we are intrinsically disordered. What did you do, go ask a priest. What did you think he was going to say? “Those are funny words,” I say. I push you down on your back and you hesitantly yield. You tell me this is wrong, but I unbutton your shirt. “Intrinsically,” I say: “something,” one button, “inherent,” another button, “to its,” one more button, “own nature.” I finish unbuttoning you and push your shirt back. “Disordered,” I unfasten your pants. “If I said I loved you, would you say that was disordered?” You are squirming and already hard. I nuzzle your dick with the tip of my nose and then kiss it. You try to slide away, but your dick is stronger than your scruples. You don’t know the answer to my question. “This is my prayer,” I say, and take your cock between my lips. Did you think about it while I gave you a blowjob? Afterward, you pound your fists on the wall, shake your head, and leave without a word. I go into the bathroom and vomit. Sperm always upsets my stomach.
I wrote you a haiku:
The shadow you cast
At the place where I knell down
I eat your bitter figs.
8.
I’m going to preach a faggot sermon now: a homily on disgust! An object lesson on when you fucked me like a dog! Did you think that I didn’t feel disgusted the first time I did it? I felt disgust the first time when my ass cheeks were first pulled apart and a male member forced my anal muscles wide open, when I had to struggle to relax enough to let it in. Everyone tells us that we are supposed to be disgusted and so we are. Disgusted by the foul act of having a greased cock shoved up your shit hole. I could have died of it, but I didn’t. You know why? Because I fashioned myself out of that disgust. That dirty pleasure of feeling it slide in and out, the pressure of that disgust rubbing against my bowels. You say you don’t want to be made out of disgust, but you don’t have much choice. Nothing can come from what is static and sterile. You have to get down and dirty for anything to grow. You know this but don’t know this. Corruption is the key to life; it is regenerative. You garden in the dirt and make things grow; you should know. The pure has to be corrupted or it dies. I make myself into dirt, you are familiar with dirt, filled with worms and rotting dead matter, that stuff that people are so quick to wash off. But plants need it to thrive, don’t they? They feed on death and rot to live and grow. I make myself dirt so I can keep on living. You will have to become dirt like me, or you will die. You can’t love from the vantage point of purity, you must become disgust, live it, be it, get in the dirt and roll in it, and then you can love it. Like the Word becomes flesh, that’s how. You have to fall and live in the dirt for it to be real. It's not real if it stays in the pristine realm of ideas. You will come to love it, bringing another person inside of you, into your interior, as far as you can go, making them part of yourself. Then you can love the filth and the disgust when you become it. One day, you will fall too, you will take it up the ass, and you will become a flood of disgust that will overflow that low stonewall by the stream bed we sat on one day and drown me. Then I will rise, and you will be mine, forever.
9.
I turned on the shower and let the warm water run down my skinny body and soaped it all over. Unlike you, I have little hair covering mine. My muscles look stringy to me, incompetent to defend itself, and breakable. I feel weak and vulnerable sometimes in this body, so I tend to give it away to strangers for their use. Your body wraps around me, hides me in its arms and between its legs. Your torso is a thick shield where I can lie limp in your embrace in the warm nest of your hair. I reached out and grabbed you by your elbow from where you stood over the sink looking deeply into the mirror. I don’t know what you were seeing in your face. I wanted you to come into the shower, and with a little coaxing, I pulled you in to wash the sweat of our sex off and soap the slight roll of fat around your belly, as the water struck your chest from over my shoulder. I guess I touched you wrong. You tried to take the soap away from me to wash yourself. But I didn’t give it up. So, you hit me. I’m weak. It hurt. I dropped the half-used bar of soap into the bathtub. I raised my fingers to my nose and turned away under the spray of the shower so it ran down the back of my head. I touched my fingers to the white tile and left a red fingerprint that streaked on the wall. I tilted my head back and let the warm water run down my face and wash the trickle of blood away from my nose. The water covered my tears, but not my sobbing. You said you were sorry; you never hit anyone before; you don’t know why you did it. You got your first taste of my blood. You will have many more. I guess the water washed away enough of my filth from your body so you could feel virtuous again. I turned and put my hands on your shoulders then ran them down your arms to your hands, and lifted your fists to my lips. I left some of my blood on your knuckles, then stepped out of the shower and went to my room to change the sheets on the bed, which I threw in a pile on the floor. I don’t know if you ever finished your shower. You didn’t come to me. You left quietly soon after.
I cried that night instead of writing you a haiku.
10.
At first, I refused to have anything to do with the moist brown soil of your asshole. Soon after I first met you, I danced around you, leaping like a fool. You thought it was funny until you asked me what I was doing. I was actually feeling happy that day, it was another shameful outburst of sentimentality on my part, so I turned it into something bitter and sarcastic, and told you, I was selecting you as a sacrificial virgin like in Stravinsky’s ballet. You don’t know shit about ballet, but can run a chainsaw. “Ooh, A queer lumberjack,” I mock you. I fain being frightened of your masculinity. “Aren’t you a brute?” So, I remember that your asshole is still virginal. It awaits being penetrated like a Samoan virgin deflowered by a dildo before being led away to her new husband. So, I laid down on the bed and told you to come here and climb on top. Use your saliva to make my dick slippery and then hop on. You were resistant because you think it’s degrading to have a cock up your ass. I laughed at you for being squeamish. So, I mocked you some more: “take it like a man, you pussy,” I said. You agreed to go through with it even though I didn’t think you would. You take off the crucifix hanging around your neck, you don’t want a certain someone to see what you are about to do, and drop it onto the pile of your clothes lying at the side of my bed. And then you take it like a man, all the way, with your eyes closed and your mouth open, bracing yourself with your hands that are planted on either side of the pillow where I laid my head. You liked it more than you were willing to admit, but you insisted on using a condom. You were not yet willing to be contaminated by me, at least not there, in that way. I reached down and rubbed your cock that is pressed between our bellies with the palm of my hand and my thumb on the underside. You reach your climax before I do. I smear your sperm all over your cock and our bellies. Afterward, you will not put the crucifix back on. You get dressed, you don’t wear underwear, and you shove it into your pocket right next to your sticky cock.
11.
What did you do in the wastes of San Antonio? In the desert of Saint Anthony? Let me imagine it. You were sitting in church, your ass aching on a hard pew, trying hard to prove your virtue to yourself, and you say your prayers like a good Catholic boy, in a whisper, straining for a self-righteous awe in your voice. And when the priest lifts the host, your savior’s body, you feel a cold hand grab you by the throat. You can’t swallow, stopping you from taking his body into your own, preventing you from swallowing what you really wanted to eat. And that hand drives you from the church, to embrace your own special desert, where you punish yourself, flagellating your body with whips to bloody your back. Did you drag a wooden cross through the sand? Oh, you protest! You say that is not so? You are not allowed to speak here; you are cast into the role of a mute beast of burden carrying your cross. Let’s look more closely at your secret. How long have you been trying to keep it; how many times have you tried to destroy it? That secret that makes you into filth; that temptation in the desert. He had dark eyes and worn dusty jeans rubbed thin on the seat and faded around the crotch. His belt buckle was what first caught your eye. The cowboy hat topped off the effect, or the sleeveless shirt, open at the neck, showing his tattoo of a hooded cobra, or a bandana shoved in his back pocket. He was willing to let you perform some act on him, to go down, but you touched him wrong, you wanted to kiss him, and he punched you in the mouth rattling your teeth and bloodying your lip. He spat on the ground and yelled out a foul name that razed your innocent soul with its claws, You didn’t disagree like you should have. And that’s when you brought out your whips (metaphorical whips) the ones that lash your mind and whip your emotions into devout avowals to resist better, with prayers and oaths of righteous self-hatred. But they make you sicker; more driven to inflict pain until you reach exhaustion. You withdraw your objections now? It happened something like that, you say. Maybe it would have been better if you took real whips to your back. Those wounds heal more easily. Maybe it would have been better to drag that heavy wooden cross in the desert sand, leaving a nice long furrow behind you, a gash in the earth that marks the path you plowed for yourself. And maybe, under your weary footsteps and dehydrated tongue, a real angel would have appeared. But it probably would have pointed an accusing finger and commanded you to try harder.
12.
And then came your confession. Now I know your dirty little secret that makes you hate your cock. Candles were burning all around you: prayers to the saints. You wanted to confess your obscene thoughts to your priest. It was the first time you got up the nerve to confess them when Christ caught your eye. A wooden carved Christ over the altar, part of the statuary that Catholics love so much, with a real crown of thorns that looked like barbered wire wrapped around his wooden head. Painted streams of blood streaked down his cheeks and splattered his shoulders. His long narrow body stretched out and his stick-like arms contorted into an unnatural pose, with haggard lean wiry muscles leading the eye to the hands that dripped their own blood from between gnarled clenching fingers; his hands in the process of turning into bloody fists. Above the nailed down feet with their curling toes, and hidden behind a discrete cloth that obscured his loins from view, was a large sweaty cock—it had to be huge because he was the son of God, but rendered useless and wasted because of his virginity. It gave you an erection. You wanted to touch him, feel his hard muscles, and kiss his wounded feet. He brought out in you a mixture of submissive piety and aggressive anger. You wanted to surrender your will to him and be compliant to his moral rules that deny your own being. You wanted to destroy your own soul and give it up in exchange for his. You felt like you put those nails there yourself, that you were responsible for his injuries, his pain was your fault and you couldn’t stand the guilt. You’re such a good Catholic. Then you had a hostile urge to grab a hammer and drive those nails in further, shove the thorns further down into his skull, and rake them across his eyes that stared at you so accusingly. You wanted to dirty him up with your spite and cover him with your spit, phlegm, and cum. Make him obscene and degraded, the way he made you feel. That only heightened your shame, and arousal, and convinced you of your depravity and absolute worthlessness that no baptismal water could wash away. Confession is useless now; your sin is unpardonable. You had to take your own punishment into your own hands, and drag your own cross in the barren sand; drive those nails into your own flesh. Punish yourself in his image. You will be sheathing and filthy; become the dirt under your feet from which the apple tree grows that holds the serpent of temptation coiled within its branches. You will taste that knowledge of good and evil, and stop mistaking lies for truth and right for wrong.
I wrote you a haiku:
Insincere spirits
Make thunderstorms in your eyes
That mocks your being
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