Temptation of the Rope
The link between us all
is tragedy, & these so many years
later, I am thinking about him,
all of twenty & gay & more free
than any of us might ever be,
& this is one way of telling the story,
another one is aphorism or threat:
blood on my knife or blood on my dick,
which is to say that surviving that young &
beautiful and willing to walk every day
as if wearing sequins meant believing
that there is always something worth risking doom.
There is no reason for me to think of him
now, especially with the football player’s
hanging body eclipsing another prison
cell, except, maybe the kid whose name
I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered
something the dead man’s singing legs could
never, how not to abandon the body’s
weight, & how to make the body expand,
to balloon, to keep becoming, until even
the danger could not swallow you.
One day I watched him, full of fear for
my own fragility & wondered how he dared
own so much of himself, openly. For all
I know every minute in those cells
was safe for the kid whose name
I cannot recall. But how can a man ever
be safe like that, when you are so
beautiful the straight ones believe it &
want to talk to you as if they love you
and want you to dare them to believe
some things in this world must be
far too lovely to ever be broken.
Copyright Credit: Reginald Dwayne Betts, "Temptation of the Rope." Copyright © 2017 Reginald Dwayne Betts. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.
Source: PoetryNow (2017)