Poetry, Part Fifty-nine

What follows is my first and only poem about being in a gay bar.

You always imagine that you'll meet Mr. Right somehow but manage instead, if you're lucky, to meet Mr. Right Now. All these years later, I realize that the bars were not, for whatever reason, the place to meet the right person for an LTR, at least for me anyway. I have met some very good friends over the years in bars, but no one who even came close to becoming a life partner. The Internet hasn't been that much better either, at least for now.

I have known so many guys over the years who never had a problem meeting a man for a permanent relationship anywhere. I either met the wrong person, or the right person but at the wrong time. It happens. So it must have been me. And if I kept hearkening back in my novels to Paul, the interested cadet I met on the Cog Railway heading down Pikes Peak in the summer of 1984, I suppose I can be forgiven just a little for wondering if the man I let get away without figuring out how to give him my phone number was The One.

Reservations in Dim Light

Potential lovers
realized
are not what we seemed,
or they saw.
The progressive evening,
as it malingers,
raises and lowers appreciation--
rejects and is,
in turn,
rejected.
We tempt
to soften the cruelty of our inspection.
But, as brutal as we select,
we live a night as we are chosen
who cannot view the soul.

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