Hustler on Ponce

Youth sells itself here,
on this once grand avenue
named for the conquistador
who sold us all
on the fountain of youth.
Near the old Ford factory
leather daddies strut
their chaps, short red hair
on red skin, curling
in the breeze outside
the Atlanta Eagle.
Saturday afternoon.
I’m settling today
for the ease of a trick,
smooth kid of perhaps twenty,
white wifebeater,
camo shorts & bright new Nikes,
with a braggadocio
no one near the corner Popeye's
can touch at this moment.
I’ll worry later about the wisdom,
but take him up on his offer,
a twenty-dollar blowjob
in the parking lot
between two Dumpsters,
where no one can see.
Just a glossary of graffiti
on the concrete wall
that muffles our sex
from the squealing brakes
of his next customer,
in from the Baptist suburbs.

 

Night Out

I can't stand the thought of you,
not even for one more second,
so I wash you away with my best soap,
make a thick lather of my favorite shampoo,
then change clothes five times
in a frenzy in need of a punching bag,
and you're gone to Vegas with work.

I drive into the city to find solace,
wet kisses of whiskey & cola
in a dark corner, the smell of concrete.
Old sweat with a hint of sex
and a smidgen of college-boy fear.

He misses my references to Whitman,
all energy and light that he was,
so a quick decision is made
to keep the whiskeys & colas coming
and to put to an end that college-boy fear.

We settle on a cheap airport motel,
orange spreads & a broken ice machine.
After we've worked the bed off its frame,
fucked stars into daylight,
the rent boy and I skip breakfast,
fade permanently and without pretense
from each others' autobiographies.

We're nervous balloons at a party,
needing the high sweet helium of praise,
before it floats away unseen,
to the next town, the next big thing.

 

© 2008 Brian Brown

Brian Brown lives in Fitzgerald, GA. He has taught high school history, worked with Georgia Public Television on their award-winning Georgia Backroads program, and served for several years as the Interpretive Director at the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Irwinville, GA. He is presently creating a digital collective of Southern photographers, as well as a photographic survey of Georgia in the Great Depression. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Santa Clara Review, Keyhole, Roanoke Review, and Caveat Lector, among others. Visit Brian online at his photographic blog, vanishingsouthgeorgia.wordpress.com, or at queerwriters.ning.com.