the roof
may be the only place you can find infinity in a city — the big dome sky, clay soft tar under bare feet, vertiginous ledge to piss over, a blimp lit from within circling Fenway like an over-weight duck. i don’t go up there often, but when i do it’s with just one person and the time spent is as rare as the location. stars shoot, traffic below purrs like surf, moonlight quick-silver melts on the face of a boy, laughter lifts like beating wings, like a beating heart and closeness is possible and real. one night, up there, after wine and too many cheap beers, the two of us peek through splayed fingers at a fatty in his underwear bucking towards his girl in mock sex-god pantomime. he looks silly and doesn’t know we’re watching. we try not to be voyeurs but can’t help it. we fall down on our backs giggling like teenage girls. we can’t believe what we’re seeing and the party on the next-door flat, raising bottles to us, has no clue. we move about, changing position, place and view. the conversation is wild and out of range, an acid escalator to the shifting pale pink clouds overhead. things are told that until this night were secret. these are dark, embarrassed, wonderful, poetic, sexy blood brother confessions. the water spout we grab onto, like a rope on a keening ship, keeps the body from falling into the bushes below when we piss, studiously apart from one another. a golden arc splashes onto the cement, chasing a cat and turns on lights that are movement activated. we hear Hispanic staccato cha cha and buzz on a nearby porch, the girls invisible and big-titted in our comic book fantasy. we lie at the edge above the street and spit. a white cotton ball floats haphazardly three stories to the sidewalk. in a laughing fit you stomp on the tar and wake the guy in the bedroom below who didn’t want to be an asshole and make us shut up. we imagine he might send up to our roof in his place a magic girl, a proxy, to tell us that although she’s fine with the noise, he isn’t. she will hug you and touch your face as if fireflies had landed on your cheek. she will leave with a silent Navaho drift, her skirt like soft breath, and vanish downstairs and we are alone again. we are close up here, you and i, as if proximity isn’t possible in other places. statements pontificate and play, but it’s ok. we know how silly and how deep we talk. time stops or flies as we ride the wave. the imagined glint of sunrise soon to flash on the curve of earth tells us it’s late and time to go. we are lucky for the hours we had, uninterrupted. sex has happened here and kissing, but not with you. love and sex hover like a hornets, but do not bite. we are probably thinking about it, me more than you and you not with me, but the sex talk is honest, hot, revelatory and brave. it is as if we could, but can’t or won’t. there’s been 5 nights of this. one would have been enough, i guess, but we go for repeats. it is astonishing and ridiculous that more than once has worked. when something so wonderful happens we worry we’d mess it up with repetition, but fuck it, worry never got anyone anywhere. you say: ‘language is the biggest obstacle to communication’. i say: ‘my heart opens up when you’re around’. ‘yes’ you reply, mentioning Joyce whom i can not read. maybe you will read him to me aloud some night on this roof. we thump downstairs into a dark kitchen, down a dark hallway, outside onto the sidewalk we just looked down upon. we shiver and i walk you home, off roof. we finger snap ‘good-night’ with exhausted smiles. the sky is more full with fading stars and a thin pale moon.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
About The Paragraphs and how to order
Or here
