Category Archives: Thomas

Super Moon

“Turn it down,” I shouted as I banged upon the sky.
“Can’t you see, I can not sleep, but really need to try?”

The moon’s enchanting laughter rained on downy forest bed.
I felt the weight of morning’s chores, an ice floe in my head.

She said, “tonight’s my special night, you can’t deny me this.
It’s many years before His plan returns me to such bliss.”

I peeked through curtained window pane, and out into the yard,
I figured just a little glance, it wouldn’t be that hard.

And then she called, “it’s early yet, I want to dance with you.”
The summer meadow whispered back in ivory, silver dew.

I looked upon the fairy field and could not stay my course.
I had to breathe the evening light and court its graceful source.

The night went long, we drank the scent of blossoms and of earth.
The gentle breeze made music sweet and we sang with joy and mirth.

The final dance with that sweet court, light feet upon the moss.
I felt the call of garish day, this magic, soon, my loss.

For with the waking to the sun, to ordinary day,
I barely, still, could hear her song, “tonight, come out and play.”

—-
Tonight she calls to dance again, but now I must say “no”.
The late night kept my day off keel and the hours ticked by slow.
So now, tonight, I climb to bed and wish that wraith adieu.
The moment passed, the glitter lost, the ghost of one I knew.

A grammar, interrupted

He kissed me in the linguistics section of the local used book store. The irony was not lost on me, because the gentle tapping of his tongue on my lips was a language, itself, full of meaning and intention, meant to make me lose, at least, my train of thought, and at most, my self control, which had been tugging at the leash all day, and trying to abandon me for easier work.

I was reading about an analysis of the Baltic languages through the lens of artificial semantics models, when he surprised me with that gift. The wave of feeling was immediate and overwhelming.  The page went blank, and the room grew so hot I almost fainted.

The first tear started in my left eye, and it was the kind of tear you get when you see something precious rescued from a fire, or a  predator mothering what would normally be prey. A glimpse of something bigger and more beautiful. The power of kindness and the stab of hope.

The other tear came with sadness. The loss of the moment only just begun. The realization that what I know this to be
is not what I feel it to be,
and not what I want it to be.  Too soon to grieve, but too late to fix the course.

The wave hit me, and quickly passed, but those two feelings, side-by-side, still lingered. I stood there in my moment of drama, shaking inside, and probably outside, to anyone who was closely watching.

He was closely watching..

I think it took him by surprise, because it was partly done in play, seeing what he could do in mischief, and fun. But a little bit, he was testing his power, seeing what he could get away with, seeing how far he could push me.

“What’s wrong,” he said?

“Give me a moment. I’m gonna finish looking at this section.”  But 100 book spines all spoke the same thing. Communication is hard. Words are insufficient. Understanding is incomplete. We can try, but it still doesn’t make sense.

I’ve been here before: the closeness, the drawing back, the flirting, the wait, the kiss, the wondering, the surrender, the fear, the sex, then the silence. I am not ready to do it again, and it seems both hopeless and inevitable.

As we stepped from the darkness of the store into the brilliance of the day, I led him out  to a wall where we could sit and watch the traffic.

“You used powerful magic, in there,” I said, in words I hoped would understand.  “It has a big impact on me.”  I thought it would be a smile, but instead a look of concern crossed his face. I needed to ask, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

He stopped to ponder the question, which seemed to be a good sign. Then, he looked at me, the way he does. That way that makes me lose my words, and  fall deeper into his mischief.

“Yes,” he replied gently, but some part of me was not sure that he truly did, for his end game is different to mine. He is playing for sex, and I, foolishly, am falling in love.

As we started to walk again, two of the voices in my head spoke simultaneously.
“Yes, let him play.”
“Please. Don’t fuck me up.”
But neither one offered me words that would give me any real clarity. Meaning would have to wait.

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For love and staus updates

So here I am, in a bar near a tourist section of Boston. The upstairs is crowded, and people are dancing to the music some guy is playing in his Mac, over big speakers. There is a boy-girl couple on one side of the dance floor. A young attractive pair, jerking and twisting to the music that is blasting until my teeth hurt. Her body is swinging frenetically, swinging her hair and arching her back, her butt pressed against her partner’s front as she tosses her head back in an expression of disco ecstasy. Her boyfriend sways his body, more or less in the rhythm of the music, his face casting off an almost blue shine. Just out of her visual range, he is texting.

Getting to Ghana

First it didn’t seem like we were ever going to arrive. Our plane to Accra was pushed back from the gate only to discover that there was a mechanical problem (again!). The left wing de-icer was malfunctioning. It took about an hour for Delta to decide this plane wasn’t going to get fixed anytime soon. But they had another plane available. (This was fortunate since the next flight to Ghana was on Monday — which would make us 72 hours late). So off we loaded onto people movers and moved to another terminal and gate where a new plane a waited. With all the moving about and getting the plane ready we didn’t leave until 9pm almost 5 hours late. But we got an expedited take off ( we passed 9 planes waiting to take and took off without waiting in line). They also used extra fuel and cut an hour off the scheduled flight time. This was all good because the crew would almost be at their maximum on duty time when we landed at Accra. And if the crew was expected to max out then the flight would haveto be cancelled.

The flight once we were airborne was uneventful. I slept ( although not well ) almost the entire flight. We landed in Accra at 11:15 cleared immigration picked up our bags and then cleared customs. We then met our driver and then were on our way at 12:30

Progress so far (Hartford)

As always travel is an adventure. Our flight from Hartford to JFK is cancelled so our trip out is delayed 24 hours.

A bit of a bummer but the delay gives us time to catch our breaths and get a good nights sleep. The airline is paying for our hotel tonight — so that’s nice.

Tommorrow we will drive to JFK in the morning (not wanting to risk another flight delay)

But for now God seems to be telling us to slow down and catch our breath.

Gay zombie movies and brain-shaped Jello molds

Thank you to Dave from the Boston Gaylaxians Science Fiction Society for hosting an excellent gay zombie movie fest. OK, let’s deconstruct those modifiers:

  • ‘movie fest’ – yeah, we got that one. More than one movie + food.
  • ‘zombie movie’ – sure, every one’s heard of them. You know. The dead rise again to eat their living predecessors.
  • ‘gay movie’ – well, sure. who else can make a movie fabulous?
  • ‘gay movie fest’ – yeah, a bunch of gay guys getting together to watch movies ( and discuss the food, the camera work, and the existential loss when celluloid went digital.)
  • ‘gay zombie’ – ok, yeah, it’s a genre. Not as big as gay vampires, but what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
  • ‘gay zombie movie fest’ – now THAT is fun.

We saw two movies and three shorts:

  • Gay By Dawn
    • Bubba, uncle BillyBob, Cletus and the boys are sitting around a campfire telling scary stories. The scariest one causes them each to eye the other with dread and suspicion till the ‘money shot.’ “There ain’t no such thing as ‘gays.’ They made ’em up to scare people. Like ‘Mexicans.'”
  • Night Shadows
    • Online hookup turned mini-massacre as the undead return to extract their revenge on etheir fuck-buddy.
  • Otto: or, up with dead people
    • Medea is a post-Master’s graduate drop-out philosophy major decrying the oppressive nature of capitalism, business, consumerism, crowds and the living in general with a dissertation-style exposition that sounds like she just read Marx and Nietschze and listened to Alban Berg operas while getting high on black fingernail polish. Otto is dead. Medea is putting together a movie about zombies, called ‘Up With Dead People,’ to express the terminal undeath of modern culture. Otto is dead. Medea is aided by her black-and-white silent-movie girlfriend, her handsome, photographer brother a cast of hunky, gay-goth, sex crazed, zombie wanna-be’s. Otto is dead. There’s no describing the fruits of this particular collaboration.. You have to see it.
  • Gay Zombie
    • A post-mortem coming out story, poigniant, touching and utterly wrong.
  • At twilight, come the flesh eaters.
    • Ok, this one was porn – with the full monty – and if you’re into vegetabies, it’s the full Del Monte. Lettuce fetish? Into long, hot sessions of copping onions ( ok, scallions )? Do you often find sex toys while searching for toilet paper at a party? In the movie with in a movie motif, ‘Night Of The Living Dead’ is remade using drag queens and sex crazed zombies. Overall, the sex was mediocre, the story line was sometimes creative just for the sake of being wierd, and the moral was, yes, ‘don’t fuck your friends.’ (in the bad way. in the good way, it’s fine. apparently)

There were spooky cupcakes, frighteningly hot wings, a Jello mold in the shape of a right cerebral hemisphere, and a punch that had a serious punch to it.  Oh, and check out Dave’s great website QueerHorror.com

I had a blast and it was great to meet the guys and to find birds of a feather! Zombies ROCK. grraaaaoooowww. braaaainsssss.