Donald Rawley
© 1996
CITY OF MEN
I am in love in a city of men.Men who grab
my backward glance
with the threatened beat
of their breath,
men whose nights
are convenient and sly.
Men with mirrored glasses and rifles
laughing on the freeway,
men who punch the air with
their angry sex
men with the squint of a hyena.
This is my city
and I smoke cigarettes like convicts.
My men are as peerless as dukes
with the static strength of statues,
with their cocks in hand
tempting fate
and the hair on their bellies a warning.
My men are prudent with joy,
men who discard love and memory
when their sight
has big muscle and hair.
Men who allow me crime and melancholy.
Men who allow me nothing.
I take it all like barbituates
and I am in a sleep of men.
Men who disorient me.
They take my eyes like dice.
I study their buttocks with
the greed of a child.
Men. I can be a vanishing act.
Men who know how to smoke a cigarette
without women's fingers,
men who understand their role.
Men with caked hair
under their arms,
men with pink skin and a lisp,
beautiful men with histories and gifts
as constant as a fine bell.
Men who die for no reason.
Men who have a white light,
like Valentino or Clara Bow,
the light moths
kill themselves for,
the white light that makes me
sit up and blink like a child,
a pupil
a student of men's eyes
lit with candles and starch,
a congregationof men
who are fireflies and saints.
Men are as kind as
any animal who can steal.
As kind as your sexual history of Mexico
with your men reeling with tequila.
Men who smell fine as dirt
and the salty perfume of paid sex,
men who allow their semen
to run through every channel.
Men. I can touch their palms when I dream.
Young men with still perfect limbs,
ex-husbands in loud sweaters,
groomed men with clenched teeth
who hover in packs
beyond the shotgun eyes
of deserted women,
fat men with a comic's sweat and ripe hands,
tired men sitting on safe settees
full of bibles and loss
beyond the dull swipe
of rolled lawns,
men who make love with piety
caninized in a frenzy of flesh,
men who masturbate their lives
so that even daylight
becomes their own private keyhole.
Men with cars for girlfriends,
men who live in air-conditioned ruins
choking with ghosts and fearing rain,
men who slam doors and telephones,
men who have secrets and money
and clean nails,
black men with skin
like wet grapes
and teeth like winter clouds,
drunk men who walk like dancing bears,
old men with wrinkled, ruined cocks
that peek out like rummy sailors,
men whose skin accumulates layers
like a granite shelf,
men with twisted veins like
Monterey pines running down
their clenched arms and spread legs.
Men whose lust is hurried and benign,
men whose lips are a crime,
men who are boys that play
with black leather and vaseline,
boys who shadow box their
fancy passions in alleys
and steam rooms until dawn.
Men who ride horses naked in the desert.
Men who surrender nothing.
Men with the pinched faces of thin air,
staring out of glass buildings
so high they can only see mountains
they do not understand.
Men in average blue suits
with wives in another state,
men with the laughter of poets
running elevators and pumping gas
with delicious, cracked large dry lips,
smoking unfiltered Pall Malls
and scratching their asses.
These are the men with the rhythm of
my city's white light,
men whose eyes are lit by gin and possibilities,
men who work in airports
and have never flown,
men who are not safe in numbers,
men who drive beat up cars
and live with scarred women,
men who watch the stars
with drugs and candles
from the roofs of shabby buildings,
men who come like a car wreck,
men who are mindless
with prodigy,
men who eat rocks,
men with cypress green eyes
and hairy shoulders,
men who devour
a callous embrace,
all the men I find
beyond my barricades,
all men that tell me
of hymns of earth
and the strength of my loins,
of tasting the white light,
of being in love in a city of men.
