Lions and Gazelles
As the frat boys roll into the Lower East Side––their collars popped and their Docksiders worn with salt water from the deck of Daddy’s boat––I stay close to the walls hoping to go unseen.
Their girlfriends are impossibly tall, their legs going all the way up, with boots that cover their knees and skirts that go nowhere. They look foreign to me as if sometime a few thousand years ago we split off in separate directions down the evolutionary road.
They are gazelles and lions while I’m a fisher cat slinking through the shadows.
But back at my apartment, with the music switching been Lana Del Rey and Richard Thompson, there are limbs and whiskey that have come from a million different directions. We’ve come from old families and broken ones. We’ve come from black sands and swamps, and we’ve come from towering buildings with doormen who raised us as much as anyone else. We’ve come from trailers and mansions, our bodies and minds as varied as the changing streets that crawl off into the hidden places we don’t yet know.
Sometimes I wonder if our kissing and undressing is simply another way to cope with the swirling mess outside our windows.
If our naked bodies, slick with sweat and beautifully bruised, let us melt into the night as much as the heels and backwards hats do. We laugh loudly and often, even as thighs part and lips becomes wet with anticipation. We move between staring in awe and drifting off behind closed eyes while the world holds us without thought.
The elegant animals on the streets howl into the evening as we pull sounds from our own lips, drowning out the noise from below.
