"Since I moved to New York City"

Since I moved to New York City and have genuinely experienced the astonishing universe of life that exists here, I can't help but acknowledge how it has changed me in certain respects. But there's one aspect I've been thinking about recently: sex, sexuality, gender, and personhood. This includes sex work, which I had an initial concept, reaction, and impression of—until I came to NYC, and that all changed significantly through something so simple as meeting people and listening to them. What a concept! I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this, but the murder of five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs, CO, has prompted me to do so. And truthfully, as I write this, it really feels like some shitty token of condolence from a cis-male, which is disingenuous. But I want to be entirely honest about how I feel and think, so I am composing this note. It is meant to be as much for myself as it is a blazon of my love for all those that have been, and remain, maligned and discriminated against in this country and world. I've learned, and continue to learn, so fucking much from all the persons I've met over the years, particularly here in NYC, about being different from what I am. You've been some of the best, most genuine, and most multi-faceted people I've ever met. And I want to say that I'm here as an ally, a friend, and a fellow human being. Here to fight for you; here to continue fighting for you!

In the vastness

In the vastness of emptiness and darkness
I reached out

With my hand, though minuscule and corporeal as it was

I reached toward the distance

The distance, the depth of the universe

I wanted to grasp

And clasp the tumbling of atoms

As they woke

When they first woke, so long ago

When I dreamt

And saw them career in the infinity of existence

And I talked to them

My longing for nebulas and galaxies

Has made me remember

That I came, far-flung, from far away from a star

From a star, a star, my mother, my mother-sun

– M.M.

What's in a Name?

What's in a name?

A name sometimes given,

sometimes wanted,

sometimes earned.

A name serves as an anchor

of who we are, bound as we are

to the gravity of this life.

The pace of our step, through

our time here, is matched by

our name: Our name that

we carry and carries us.

I think it strange and curious

that everything we do and

everything we don't is

an utterance of our name.

Our name is so singular to us

that it could very well be

our soul incarnate.

—M.M. 

"A soft love"

A soft love
A comforting love

A sleepy love

A love that reels you into yourself

    with a song that paints the echo chambers

    of your heart

A love that seeks war

A belligerent love

A love, in its naïve hubris

    sees the folly of its daggers

A peaceful and soothing love

A love not too short-sighted

    or too blind for its own good

A love... just one love

Just one time to love and

    one time to be loved

To allow the edges of the world

    its seams, to disintegrate

A love

The Love

The Love that subsumes all

    even love itself

–M.M.

"Here's a thought"

"Here's a thought," he said to himself.

"I think we ought to think like we are

at the end of our rope." This conversation

was just him trying to unlock the locked

cage he was in. But he wasn't really sure

what to say or what to do to break free

from that cage he made for himself.

"I saw them being so, so happy. I thought of

myself like that sometimes. I mean, I don't see

why I can't be like that." It was a source of naivety

as if he were really speaking from the heart.

But it wasn't really a place he could leap to,

to become something else.

It was a plane beyond that he would have to

propel himself to; far, far beyond—beyond the ire and

the misguidedness that he was and had ever been.

It's just one cosmic ejection, one thing to vault

us far beyond ourselves, that we sometimes need;

that we, that we all, desire.

                                        –M.M.

"I think it's always only a look"

I think it's always only a look
When she turns and sees him

I think it's only always a glance

When he forgets a thought

And she comes into view

It must only be a few words

Must only be a million giggles

Must only be laughs they've forgotten

I've never really understood

Until I realized understanding wasn't it

It's that thing you sometimes see

That you sometimes feel

When it appears at the side of your sight

When you feel just really good

But like, really, really good

It's like a song that you first heard

And it's made you dance around the room

Around the room like the fool

That's love

That's what it's been all along

Love

Stupid

Stupid and great and wonderful

And everything

So

I think I've been looking

For something all along

That's never, ever been

To be found,

But felt and seen and loved

                    M.M.

What attraction means to me

I've been asked before who is my "type":

And I've always hedged in my answer,

Until lately, when I finally lost all vacillation:

You see, I like the fine and the bright

I like she who speaks of the divine and heaven

I like she who renounces the Cross and dogma

I like she who sees more than the boundary

Than the boundary between the light and the dark

And how so simply that all is, that dichotomy

You see, I like she who is far more than black or white

Far more than light or dark, or the falseness of dichotomy

I like she who sees beyond the idiocy of supremacy

The word that dictates to you and allows no heresy

And I like she who is sweet and kind and full of heart

Full of heart, full and kind, someone who is gifting the world

For whoever she may be, she would be a gift, someone whole

And yet, someone not whole, not full, not kind

Because who of us is any of that: we really are none of that

You see, she who I like: she would be far more than me

Far more me than all the expectations I've ever made for her

And yet, completely something I have nothing of that expectation, you see?

It means absolutely nothing, really

It's never meant anything to me

Who I like, who I want to be with—is—

"We were wayward stars"

We were wayward stars, filling ourselves with elemental might
Fighting against predestination with our recidivist light
The forgotten souls that time threw away
Forgotten souls that the gods kept at bay

We had one chance and one chance alone
One last life to live and one future to own

And yet we desired something of terminality

We thought of undeath—stupefied by eternity

We just may be things of unsettled being

For we are not of gods—of uncaring reason

Because just as pulsars rotate singing our lovesongs

So we tumble like atoms in cosmic storms

I do not think we are much longer for this reality

I think we need not think of yesterday or of infinity

We should continue to career wildly, all awry

T'ward a glorious, unabashed—a star's—goodbye—

M.M.

Endless

I fell into a deepest hole

Seeing everything I stole

Looking up from the bottom

To the top

Smiling like a foolish asshole

And still, I make the same mistakes

Breaking what I make

Like the inevitable crack

In the side

Of what I still call my mind

I see something like a light in the sea

That I think may be, what makes me

Be free, from me

That really

Could be the cause I need

I am whoever I am, and will be

Whomever I now be

Living this endless fantasy

But it needs

An end, and an end of the false me

M.M.

The End of Summer

I felt the winds grow colder as we grew older
Just as all things came to an end

I thought of all I should have told her
Before all things came to the end

There was a melody that played throughout summer
Something that sang to us to what was no end

But I'm packing away the faded glow of her
Until it's ready to dance so wildly again

A spring that fell in love with summer

And another summer that's now gone and been

M.M.

"I thought I was for Death"

I thought I was for Death

I thought I was for nothing

I thought I was for nothing at all

But when Death came

When Death came, all handsome and beautiful

When Death came, I think fell in love

I thought when Death came, I’d be for nothing

I thought when Death came, I would be nothing

I thought when Death came, I’d be no more than nothing at all

But when Death came

When Death came and spoke to me all handsomely

When Death came and spoke to me

I spoke to Him

I spoke to Him and I listened

I spoke to Him and I heard

He said to be

He said to be something

He said to be something else

I think Death was someone

I think Death was someone else

I think I loved, and loved, and loved Death

That maybe Death was someone else

That He was someone else

Someone else who loved me

M.M. 

Love-Song of Two Stars

You perceive more than most.
You see the world for its
strings and waves, which
interlace and stream
through one another.
An attunement in you, so natural to you,
as integral as the vibrations of the world
you see within and outwith yourself.

When I give,
my ideas are compacted and
packaged. Black-hole masses
as small and as big as a thought—
and you let them blossom. Like
petals, in a spring wind, carried
near or far or however which way.
Destinations with names and locations
unknown at inception, but oh so real.

Always have I been a stone
figure, posed and still in
the dark. Something seen in
half-forgotten dreams. Stagnant
eternally. Till the shining that came
from your voice, from your mind, broke me.

We each walk paths for
ourselves—each to their own
as we each are masters of our own
creatures, unwieldy as they are.
And yet the reason always the same:
to understand a world that defies
reasoning, that wishes never to be understood.

Like ballast in my vessel, departed
from the port of a sun, you are my stability.
The first and the last—you are the atomic
in the fundamentals incised in me.

But comets, we two, far-flung and
infinite-distant. Stars in the void.
Too far to career together;
dancing too close to join.

All this an ever-dream. All this
a distance much too far, much
too much—not for you or for I, but for
us.

M.M. —  06-Aug-2016

Mind Voyage

My feet stand firmly on the ground
But my mind rides on rays of the sun
Stationary in time but waiting for more
For all my possible futures to come

I journey through the empty void
That separates one thought and another
A moment that lasts as long as a flicker

And as briefly as the touch of forever

I have waited so long for nothing at all

And for nothing to be my everything and all

A lifetime spanning one end to another end

To, at last, realize the needs of my sun's crescent

Sharpening the philosophic weapon that is my mind
Going back to the beginning and hurling myself forward
Deep into the blackest deep and unleashing it all skyward

And perhaps, one millennium, to burn, to shine, and to die

With peace and kindness, relinquished, all in one, and all mine

M.M.

Prose IX

Streaming from an imperceptible ceiling so high came down the most revealing white light. It illuminated the eerie vapor that pervaded the entire gargantuan atrium-like space, it as cavernous as its unseen ceiling was foreboding. The light defined little in the empty space save the center (or what seemed the center). There it formed a strangely, clearly delineated circle. Not even slightly amorphous as one would have thought, given the thick, diffuse vapor.

Though in fact, the light lit more than the center: It shone seemingly accusatorially on a shape-seeming man, naked and standing as if prepared for a fight he knew not from where it would come. Clenched fists by his sides, chest in a belligerent display, a visage of attentive intelligence and pride—he scanned the black all about him and waited for it to begin.

M.M.

 See, you gotta stay strong, for no one more than for yourself. You gotta believe that you are very much worth it. Worth the struggle and worth the strife. Because you see, the clutches of your pain draw the most strength from your own self-deprecation. Your prison is built by the insidious design of the lies that fester within you, that you unavoidably feed. So you must look to the innards of your self and fight for yourself. You are the first, last, and sometimes only, echelon of your own defense. Stay strong and stay faithful.

Aiming for the Horizon

I'm aiming for the horizon

For the cradle of dusk and dawn

Where both nothing and everything

Exist, in unison and in discord

I've decided to leave behind the trap

Of boxes, borders, and broken bones

All that I was beholden and usurped by

For something that is... awry and... at angles

I'm leaving behind the husk of my self—its shell

For it's so damn withered, weathered, and worn

Battered, beaten, and so bored, and burrowed

It's expended itself, now just an inkless pen

The horizon: far beyond all I've ever dreamed of

A sheen pinpoint beyond the vast mass of my own past

An unknown something, scintillating in its beauty

Finally a way out of my own darkness

M.M.

"Full-blooded and bold"

Full-blooded and bold
I have strife in me that fuels me
Stood upon the surface of the sun
And now I lust for the universe

Took me years to fall and years to rise
Lived off of self-doubt and dogma
A spirit with a yearning glow
And a mind building itself

There has been a darkness
Stretching from soul to sight
Darkness replete in me, filling me
Obsidian black, deathless night

I found meaning in love
I found salvation in love
I found myself when I found her
Life at long last

The sky I see, the man I want to be
Sustained by fire—lifted by might
The dreams I form, the reveries I breathe
Those living and those unborn

Twenty-eight years and time still a fear
My ambitions held in place by a single will
My heart held in hand by a single woman
And the terminal point a frightful unknown

The dreams and the desires
The storms and the fires
Visited every night, manifested every day
Fought for in every one of my living moments

M.M.

"Sometimes I forget that love exists"

Sometimes I forget that love exists

That it runs rings

round the heart

Down in the dark of the soul

I forgot that it is all

that makes us whole

Taking one step from nothing at all

To everything that we've ever wanted

and more

Just like the silence of the night

Calling us out like dying of light

Since we so adored the fight

And the heat

that it brought

Only to fall ecstatically like the rain

Gladly enduring the pain

and its ache

Ten thousand years

Or an eternal pour

I forget—and remember—that love

was everything we've ever wanted

and everything we wanted to die for

M.M.