I was a teenager, and a man in Walmart
put his hand on my back
while I was peeing.
How are you doing, young man?
I was naive then
about how some men
unlock their lust in locked spaces,
stalls with four feet,
or someone standing on a toilet seat.
In the Cathedral of Learning
stalls without doors. My college was so cruisy
they removed them.
If you needed to shit you had an audience,
good for the guys who were into that.
I never once got hit on:
no eye contact, head down, quickly unzipped.
So dumb in those days,
afraid someone would know I had a body
I wanted to do things with.
Why get on your knees with all that pee?
It wasn’t just ignorance, it was cleanliness.
How gross to have your mouth near a toilet.
My lust bleached and clean as my grandmother’s sink.
No thrill worth the risk of infection.
In my twenties on the Upper West Side
a man jerked beside me at the urinals.
I want you to watch me shoot.
His forearm lean, stiff as his cock
in the seedy club light.
He cream-splattered down his thumb.
I got hard in my hand
and went home to pee.
What was I so afraid of?
I felt like a gay man with a secret wife,
or like what I was:
a gay man who was afraid of what he might like.
I wish I hadn’t spent my life thinking
a man can’t be dirty and safe.
Instead I only learned scared-safe, self-hate, nothing
about the sloppy thrill of letting go.
Locked inside my tiny stall
while other men shoved their hard-ons
into the world, inked their stories
on rest stop walls:
Big dicks welcome. Let me swallow your load.