You want to know if it was real.

It was more real than any of the normals can possibly imagine.

But I did not care about those men anymore than I cared about the cops that came to me. They, too, had very visceral dramas playing out in all their lives. Scary stuff. But they never scared me. Mostly because while I can service a trick, I don’t connect emotionally connect to them. I connect to relationships. Working tricks is not a relationship.

The hard part was not shitting on some trick’s face. The hard part was listening to my parents explain they would no longer support, clothe, or feed me. I was twelve. It hurt.

But what that articulated neglect did was to set me on a path that had everything to do with life, and sex is life, and everything to do with death, and sex is a dance with death, and everything to do with poetry, and sex is that as well.

How was that scene with that man and his dead son poetry.

It’s poetry because I turned it into a poem. Not an ugly memory. But a poem. I take tiny bits and pieces like that man — who eventually blew his brains out when I stopped seeing him, he was a teacher which did intrigue me some — and I put those times and struggles into words. It is what I do.

They are not always words that follow the rules.

One never knows where it might go at any point in time. Poetry has many lives. Your original question jogged my memory of Mykonos.

Why.

Because it was beautiful. Those people were and are beautiful and I love them.

I need something to hang onto that is not about the bottom of the pit. I can write about that pit because I was there. I lived it. I have street creds. Those dark times do give me street creds with the troubled boys I deal with today.

Why.

Because they listen.

Where they have never listened to anyone, anyone before. I know them and their tangled guts because I was one of them.

They read my shit, and then they can bring (because now they have permission) up their own shit from deep inside their throats, and they can and do articulate their own art with it.

Those guys were and are beautiful and I love them.

As an artist and a man, you put it out there and you put it out there and you put it out there, and it will assume a life of its own.

That poem you are talking about is not about the sex to me.

To me, it’s about suicide. Mine and his. The teacher, the trick, and the twelve-year old who calls himself fourteen because that is what twelve-year-old boys do. Am I required to spell that out in poetry.

I am not a journalist. I avoid journalists.

Now, let me go see what I can do with that boy’s life on film. Film takes my head outside of writing. I don’t like to write. I like to shoot. I will post whatever I construct, here.

Was it real was it real was it real. I no longer read in bookstores. It drove me insane with the same questions and the same questions and the same questions, publishing is like Groundhog Day. It just repeats itself kinda like a nightmare. I’ve been a whore for a very long time. But with writing, I can’t give you what you want. I’m a writer. I can only give you what I want.

Besides, those bookstores had this habit of putting me and the people who showed up behind a little podium and chairs lined up right by the toilets and I got the message.

It was more real than anyone can know.

It. Still. Is.

Warning. This is not me. I am fine, thank you. This is simply the representation of a PLACE. An INTERNAL place. It simply is. It feels appropriate to the POETRY we are discussing. Which is why I have attempted to explain. Because I am an idiot who often tells poets NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EXPLAIN…

Right.