Raimundo Gabriel Alencar
You want me to read you my poems,
those I’m afraid to send out,
those you say are intimate.
“They reveal your inner you,” you say,
trying to psychoanalyze them.
Dig something out of it.
We stay naked in beg.
It rains outside,
and you smoke your joint
and pass it on to me.
“I like it when you read me your poems.”
I’m not a poet.
“I remember how you like me calling you daddy.”
My voice is famished.
You grab my throat with those pink tattooed fingers.
Call me daddy.
Your voice, rough and demanding, echoes
across the crying world.
“Da—daddy.”
It comes from deep in my throat,
from deep in my mind.
I call daddy the one I’ve been looking for my whole life.
I call daddy the silhouette of the man
my mom told me cheated on her.
I call daddy the strong embrace in cold nights.
I call daddy to feel secure in a man’s arms.
I call daddy the ones who call me faggot.
Can I cry on your chest, daddy?
But I don’t ask that because I have no voice.
The faggot knows only how to moan.
He knows only how to lick the fingers that mark his throat.
He knows only how to beg,
staring at those brown eyes of yours.
Are you him?
Have you seen him?
The shadow of the man who has abandoned me.
He moans after me.
His lips demand my attention.
Forget them.
Forget all of them.
You live with me now, his eyes said.
And yet there was silence.
The world vomited rain.
You whispered something.
And I called out daddy once more.
The shadow of the man who left me to behold.
Raimundo Gabriel Alencar lives in Brazil and spends most of his time working, writing, reading everything under the sun, and studying languages.