AN OPEN LETTER TO JOSEPH PETER NARAS

or, The Regrettable Dramatic Arc of Loving a White Boy

It’s a wonder our grind never toppled, that we were lap and gulp sincerely, lips layered away, pubics in expecting parallel, burning the outlawed outline of our writhe into the lawn, outlandish hues vital and nasty in erupting weeds, our bound structure never wearying of the questioning prod, the wishful pummel, ninth period over, the snarlers and spitters slow gone and we were out loud, right out in the open, out of our damned minds running our tongues around the edges of war, how socially insane our primal twist, the doomed conjoined clock of us, the engine of our against, your fingers a disruption in hair just learning to explode. Every Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, we stumbled in frustrated dangle away from the grounds of Carl Schurz High School, temperatures skewered, our souths hammered and drip through denims. Separate buses spit their oily smoke to the north and west and we pressed radiant genital ache into the ride, red-inking continued crave into matching notebooks, our poetry ripped through with dactyls and something no one but two ballad-battered fools would call a future.

Love at our sixteen smothered the jointly-addressed niggernote.

Don’t know

why it took your father’s friend so long to see us, to witness our open wounds browning the grass. Imagine his gape his flushed goddamnit his bulge-eyed conviction to upright the collapsing, to shove the wild way-ward back into orbit, to push those colors back inside the lines, to reteach the day away from the fall. I’ve dreamed often of his vile and sputtered reportage, spittle showering the receiver, every other word a resolute and hurtled scarlet.