in & out of jean shorts (the reel catches)

Picture a flower dreaming
of its own future
folded inward, enclosed within its seed
& its surroundings
my nascent
homosexuality is that
I love every body even

as if it were my own
which is to say
I love every body as if
I were myself
tasked with becoming both
object & the offer
of adoration begged

by it    Is it
wrong to think
If I weren’t sitting
on a bench overlooking the Vieux Port
not considering each vessel
approaching the Canebiére but
where each one has been only

recently this would read
otherwise or not at all
which is to say I am indebted to so many
forms & what can
only be gifted by our
swift encounters    I bow before
velocity & haphazard excess, the latent succulence

contained or carried by
words, a generous
invitation to plunge or plummet
or to be the hole itself
out of which something always
something blossoms (count the number
of times naugahyde appears in the text)

(count the number of times hypnotic & ass mingle
in my mind) Reading Puig from memory
I can place myself
back
at the beach &
every time or so it seems
I wish for sex out

in the open, to have
some strange body
glide over mine, to collide
as if to butterfly
underwater required not one
but two sets of salty
chests & jutting

calves (last
night’s intermittent dream
where my penis appears
in public, veering in & out
of jean shorts almost violently)
& Puig’s wish (how could I
forget this?) to grow up & not

to become movie star
but movie, which means
assemblage, network, motoric
scrapbook, the discontinuity of the act
of filming—set pieces
rushing across the set & the set
itself but also the future

of the subjects within the frame—
not just the act of filming but its unknowable
points of view, simultaneous & multiple
months or only moments later & always
to return & to beg reception
draped in dark or the privacy
of some well-lit home, alone

or in the company of people
one has only ever seen in passing
reimagined through this allowance
for difference, which is my own
inability to say where Puig’s wish
comes from (other
than Puig himself, speaking

as if he were still a child, unless
Puig, at 43 or 44 or more, awaited a life
of substitution & self-adaptation
unless Puig, ever exuberant
is still awaiting to be, the way in place
of source or reference I find only my own origin: my
meticulous way of copying out

everything that comes even everything
that evades me)—is it me
is it Puig is there any difference?
The opposite of authorship
is feverish attribution, my tendency
to assume all thoughts
I have belong to everyone

& doesn’t
a changeover
imply the endeavor to move
by rapidly opening
& shutting one’s eyes? The real catches
only if I deny myself
its recognition

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