Masks or Moods

Yesterday on my ride home on the 4 Train from Manhattan to the Bronx, I sat next to a person who was the splitting image of Essex Hemphill one of my favorite poets from the 80s/90s who died of AIDS. In my “Days of our Lives” imaginativity my daydream fantasies gravitate to imagining how I might have meet him and become his lover. Would my rude abrupt straightforwardness have helped him write more interesting poetry or would true love have reduced him to the mere embers of his previous burning self engendering a shadowy man resentfully teaching at some ill-attended poetry writing class at our local university? Would he have liked my cooking. Might the never ending desire to escape the banality of domestic like and the knowledge of far more ecstatic sexual release have driven him to clandestine hook-ups and affairs he'd have ingeniously disguised from my wishful-thinking outlook I'd have mistook for trust. Would some inability of love have manifested and driven me to drink and dissolution. My fascination with his stubbly and intellectual beard, with his lips, and chest and dick have waned over enough time, leaving me in a scenario I dread more acutely than loneliness - existing in a perpetual ennui and dread bubbling from immersed ideas that I could never be good enough to make another person happier than they would have been if they'd never crossed paths with me.

Why didn’t his death many years ago squelch this daydream of remorse and regret? Is it enough to stand in front of impatient bread trucks to let old ladies in walkers make the light on 49^th Street and 9^th Avenue, to calm the tides of a mind jammed with all the windblown files I can't move to the recycle bin?  Before 1995 when Hemphill died,  I was afraid to buy his poems, knowing I could never see what he saw, could not be more than an acolyte, an intellectual twink. Why did I create this fantasy only to use time to potato peel it skin-strip by discolored skin-strip with my non-fastastical atoms of reality.

At the end of heavy breathing/ does it come to this – Heavy Breathing
Essex Hamphill Wiki Entry