all that hair slicked back with foamy mousse
drying hard as a helmet. There he goes,
his eyes watching his own shape in the mirror,
the outline of his half-hard dick in jeans
and the downy chest hair in the deep V
of his unbuttoned oxford places he
imagines being touched. Dumb kid, he preens
to disco music from the turntable,
some Trojans stolen from his father's stash
soft circles in his wallet with some cash.
He wants to slip towards life through some locked portal,
not knowing what I know now, that his face
will never be more worth seeing. He thinks
he's less like Helen than Achilles, winks
at his jaunty unlit cigarette, blows
a kiss across two decades' emptiness---
how could he have guessed that sex was like pain,
too fleeting a glance at the gods' domain,
the hero's weeping over Patroclus
depicted in his textbook. That damn queer,
I can't forgive his innocence, as if
he might be just like anyone, his love
weak armies crushed in this heart lost to fear.
