Timothy Liu’s look at sex, gay married life, and cruising is both rough and playful, a celebration of lust that almost hits, but narrowly avoids, a kind of sorrow.
—
Married
After letting my Y membership lapse
for seven years, happy to say I’m back
on the treadmill, the scale, the whole
Life Fitness circuit. Wind chill’s five below
outside. And the men with hard-ons
in the steam room have settled in for
a long afternoon. Feel free to look,
just don’t touch! Ever get the feeling
things are going to be tough, the mistress
not returning texts, the twenty-year
marriage faltering? The bliss resides
in letting go, focusing on something else
says my shrink. Is it shallow to work
on my abs while a busload of kids
get driven off a cliff just a few miles
north of Mendocino? It’s true: I grew up
next to wine country yet never took
the tour, a bona fide teetotaler who lived
by the book. Mormon men on the whole
look pretty robust even if the wilderness
has been bred out of them. Let’s face it:
a lot of dick gets sucked in America
right under our noses as long as you can
afford the dues. Even my dad, fresh
off the boat, told me how he managed to
stay at a downtown Y while a dude
with a towel wrapped around his waist
touched my daddy’s thigh in ’58. Was he
cute? I asked, Did you let him suck you
off? On the elliptical today, I ran 5K
even though it didn’t feel like running
through the park. Also watched two men
kiss on an afternoon soap, their devotion
captured in close caption. Not to brag
but in between the cardio and the weights,
I got to suck three dicks, two of them
married. The apartment kitchen sink
is backed up again, Draino on the to-do list
my husband left on the breakfast table—
a post-it stuck to a Pop-Tart left untoasted.
Let today be the day, a day like no other.
***
Interested in submitting poetry to The Good Men Project? Check out our guidelines.
Like The Good Men Project on Facebook
Photo by See-ming Lee /Flickr