of coiling hairs like those on my chin.
He leers at me as I savor the drags
of smoke I fiddle between my fingers.
He then squints to the pale-faced
moon heaving into sight outside
the window -- the image, a half-
bitten biscuit, blurred by the swaying
rose-pink curtains. In a huff,
 
I sit on a well-cushioned chair
pushed against the fluted windowjamb;
watch him dandle his head
as though it were his penis tucked
inside sheer piece of white cloth
swathed 'round his pelvis at the bar
where he dances on a platform
under shifty lights, in a smoke-swollen
room of faces, murky and limned with rut.

Each night he takes home what
is worth a week's pay of a worker
in a construction site nearby;
the lump of guilt on his tongue,
he confesses, he'd down by straining
his throat the way he would his shots
of tequila before each show, to claim
his veins, and dim the sight of shame.
Now he must be thinking of a distant
town of cornfields, where he left

his mother who's been carrying
the scourge of sun on her back,
her arthritic hand heavy
with the bolo slicing infertile
land the family never owns.
Still in the floodwaters of his mind,
bobbing, lapping is the memory
of his father who caught him
toying a cousin's man-child genitals;
and came extending his extremities
brandishing a leathered whip

on his twelve-year-old frame.
That happened in his room of bamboo
slats and woodplanks polished with banana
leaves, in the year he discovered
an appetite he now shares with me
in my room turgid with it,
in my room resounding the chorus of dogs
in the frontyard. I retreat against the back
of the chair, feeling its furry
touch on my shirt. My ears
are expectant of his breath's murmurs,
the tingles of wet puckered lips,

as he comes closer to me, his body,
a figure, lunar-luminous akin to that
of the sculpted marble nailed
to a cross above the headboard.
I don't desire his body alone, for I
can't possess something that dies
with death. I want more, more
than the throbbing flesh he presses
against mine, the rosier traces
he leaves on my skin, the flourish
and scents of sweat which sooner
would become irretrievable from memory:
for it is in the mind of my heart