coming out (in red ink)

island-lone with my old man in the diner adorned in between-the-lines lights,
choking on winter-sips of charcoal coffee to hibernate the fear in my throat.
my interior design: a one-take script scribbled in my chest like cardiac arrest,
a bomb threat—red or black wire—minefield ballet & all its connotations,
but i couldn’t give him lacking sensations, only afterlife words,
the ones without ribcage, without environment, without chorus
an honest handshake, a harmless self-portrait:
                                                        the alphabet of my desire.

so pulling from the blueprints of my honeybruised, bankrupt memorybank,
i rolled up my right sleeve & showed the nostalgia tattooed on me
for his morning sunny-side-up’s, a sibling to the shape of his laugh,
or our twin sweat on the basketball court,
his education of the pivot foot: how even in quicksand we can still maneuver
into a winning play.
but then i rolled up my left sleeve & all the names it deifies,
reminding him of the skin-cutting way
i would leech onto his leg everytime he left like premonition,
the way i see mom’s reddened nose & blackened eye everytime i feel his hands,
my young, heavyweight eyes: how i feel safest in pillbug curl with lightless sight
& even worse how it has reflected the way that i love,
the danger i become with vital organs in my line of fire,
how it islands me under the admire of stormwater,
parenthetical, howling the worst things imaginable,
        in his cadence,
every word & breath against my will.

because the eros i sisyphus is globeheavy,
where anyone could wear the wedding dress,
kisses on the forehead, rose petals in the hair
& intensely aware of my gravity, without pointing fingers,
feather in ink, sinking into sand, i pivoted for the olive branch:

queerness isn’t an aesthetic but the only way my lungs will accept air.
i need you to be okay with this. i don’t know what i’d do if you weren’t.

& he was languageless for a long time,
so long my tongue cannot dance the weight of the silence,
so my nervous fingers performed circus-acrobatics from beneath the table
& the coffee cup began sweating as if it had released a lightheavy weight,
until suddenly, with hints of repentance in the eye & a splash red ink, he said:

son, there is an ineffable guiding light, a neighbor to your soul
that i like to consider as god: the foundation of all love.
&, to the same light inside me, i pray you grow closer to it every day.
how could i ever look away from your dormant glow?

& then we embraced
like glue until we bruised
into light anew;
the whole diner
once tumbleweeds
now elephantine applause,
& of course, it precipitated
apologies until rainbows
phoenix throughout the nation
then every child forgot
the familiar cages—

okay obviously he never said this & he never will:
the actual scene hundreds of miles apart, over the phone,
all the words turning left, like cutting the wrong wire
        every. time.
nitpicking at scabs, everything in exclamation,
leaving me this cachinnation every moonlight,
dumbstruck & unable to label
the proper adjective
for any of my tears.

but oftentimes i tell this fiction to the children inside me,
as they have awful insomnia, kept awake from his church of love,
or however you metaphor abuse, the brick road to eden i have followed.
so i give them this gospel: a fairy tale with the inclination of belief,
this new testament father to tuck them in, as we dive back into black ink.