Your laugh is the same

Your laugh is the same
Lacing the conversation
With an easy flow
As if it had never paused
What’s thirty years between friends?

Our separate lives
Stretched across three continents
Anchored to this shared
City and time we first learned
To love men—learned the hard way

The bare-chested boys
In Parc Lafontaine—the cops
Dressed in camouflage
Desires and fears do not change—
Not easily—not at all

At the metro door
We warmly embrace and swear
That we’ll meet again
Soon—but the last time goodbye
Waited decades for hello

AGG20140901
(for Jose Arroyo)

To read Songs about Sex, Death & Cicadas by Andrew Grimes Griffin, just click on the link. To download a pdf, right click on the link and select “Save link as…”

To read  as close as the clouds by Andrew Grimes Griffin, just click on the link. To download a pdf, right click on the linke and select “Save link as…”

To read the chapbook Happy Birthday Hanafuda by Andrew Grimes Griffin just click on the link. To download a pdf, right click on the link and select “Save link as…”

Facebook Photo

Chris Cockrill and Colin McKay 1984 Montreal protest against the raid of Bud’s Bar. Photo Courtesy of Jose Arroyo.

We float like eyes stitched to the sky,
Looking for each other
In all the wrong places.
from You Are Gone, Brother by Zubair Ahmed

A photo posted
From some thirty years ago
This was our beauty—
All smiles and a cigarette
At the corner of your mouth

Permanently pinned in place
Now—only ashes remain
And their phoenix memories
Flicker—just as quickly fade

As for sweet Colin
Proudly riding on your back
In protest of police
Brutality—his wide smile
Invited time’s cruel kisses

Only those who lived through war
Lost as many young men as
Did we in those years of love—
Fear—heroic caresses

AGG20130823
(for Chris Cockrill  and Colin McKay)

Depth Charge: This is a chimeric beast of a poem—half-tanka, half-quatrain.

I had previously written about the role Facebook, and social networking in general, is assuming in the creation of collective and social memory. The posting of this picture of a protest against a police raid of Bud’s bar in Montreal in 1984 is another example of memory synapses activated by shared digital information. Thanks, Jose Arroyo, for this.

Nothing could have prepared us for what was to follow in the years after this photo was taken, the onset of the AIDS epidemic that would rage completely unchecked for more than a decade, and while treatment now offers a degree of security for some, HIV continues to claim lives and loves to this day. For a glimpse at the tenor of those times, watch How to Survive a Plague.

To see all the tanka on this blog, click here.
To all non-tanka writing on this blog, click here.

A new chapbook, as close as the clouds by Andrew Grimes Griffin, is available for free reading online and/or download.

To read Songs about Sex, Death & Cicadas by Andrew Grimes Griffin, just click on the link. To download a pdf, right click on the link and select “Save link as…”