HANDS ON MY PRIVATE PARTS

I remember how the glued-on eyes of my stuffed animals...

Gave me more comfort, than adult sterile stares.

I can still feel the caterpillar crawling up my finger

as I sat on a tree stump in the school yard

I cowered,

as the other kids approached the weird boy that was me.

"What's wrong with him?"

They teased me, they didn't understand me.

They turned the lights off in the locker room

I was in seventh grade...

He, in eighth.

I recall a pair of pubescent hands around my waist

Apparently the cornrowed school bully had feelings erupting inside of him

On a more intimate level than what his boys had in mind.

I also remember,

an older family friend who checked my underwear

on the bottom bunk.

After he lifted me above his body, and made me fly like Superman.

My identity was stolen from me as a baby

I never got to know who birth me, I never got answers

As to why she left?

I heard stories about siblings, real ones.

The one I had, didn't like me at all. I prayed to God

To bring me a brother

I looked up to him like an older brother

As he rubbed my eleven year old stomach

In and out of my clothes.

Still no one knows.

For some reason it never hurt

As much as the neglect I felt from the outside world.

Cookie cutter as it seemed, As blessed as I was

To go from crack baby to Preachers kid

I always wondered why I was so different.

I felt like an alien, in an unknown world.

Surrounded by judgement.

The only brown face in a classroom

The only non-believer in a sanctuary

Humiliated by my own father on the pulpit

Hoping that one day I'll get to take a stage of my own.

Everyone else got attention

My parents with captive congregations

Their daughter took trips around the world.

I was sent to Jesus camp on a ranch in the country.

I grew up too fast. I got horny too early.

I let men who were way too old, TOUCH ME

It was how I was indoctrinated, so I thought it was normal. I went with it.

There was the basketball player who didn't like condoms

The middle aged married man who sodomized me behind a synagogue in the parking lot.

Rico from the school for the arts, who made me sit on his gigantic dick

As he sat on the toilet seat.

He didn't take "I'm not ready" for an answer.

The next day he told his friends I was a faggot

Who kept showing up at his home.

Soon the entire school thought I was an OBSESSED HOMOSEXUAL.

Every day I wanted to die....I didn't want to wake up from my sleep.

Boys touched me. Men touched me.

They would always leave or it would end up in disaster.

All the while my friend died...the one I told my secrets to.

I knew I was lonely when I got to college in a different city

I wanted to sing, but I got laughed at....

I modeled locally, some acceptance there but...At the end of the day

I didn't have a soul. I was merely an image.

A desolate one.

American Idol called my name as I passed the Convention Center in Washington DC

Home from break, already suicidal and on drugs

In a few months, The entire nation saw a comic relief on their TV screens...

I was invisible again.

I felt like that class clown

Who was desperate for acceptance

Again.

Because they looked at me, but didn't SEE me.

A sound bite and a bad hairstyle

The voice didn't speak. Yet it cried out for help

With profanities and broken dreams.

And no one was empathetic

They simply had a belly laugh.

But HE had a story.

Everyone who had ever touched me

Deserted me

Violated me

I just wanted to be loved

By someone else other than my parents

Whose love confused me growing up

But maturation told me that they just had a strange way of showing it

Because who I was

They challenged without purposely doing so.

I had a mentally abusive sister

who told everyone I was insane

An informant for our parents

Telling them of every boy who called

Pamphlets on how to repent showed up on my bathroom sink.

Turns out,

She'd be the lesbian mental case in years to come.

And they wondered

Why I sought so much comfort in Pound Puppies

And created Pleasantville with chalk on the driveway pavement.

I was a Black boy who went to school every day

At an historic plantation.

A nemesis of God at an Episcopal private school

Surrounded by robes and Bibles at home.

A faggot at his locker in a public high school

Who just wasn't Black enough for the fake thugs

An "Oreo" who sat in the back of the bus.

I towered above my immediate family

Awkward...

All the while my grandmothers spirit

Came to me after she died

I was so young, yet my mind needed AARP

She told me I was to achieve greatness

Her perfume followed me

She was a writer

As she left, she bestowed upon me

The gift of the pen.

I feel that silently,

She really understood my young soul.

My thoughts spark like fireflies

One goes on, the other goes off.

But they are everywhere abundantly

The memories, the tragedies

Give me the ability to create characters

Grant me the amazing gift of being wise beyond years

I just wish

I didn't have to write about it.

Since no one ever calls

Social media is fake, the antithesis of networking.

So as it turns out

The keyboard is my piano

My music

The melody is the current of my pain.

I hope that one day

There is an audience

Instead of laughing at me,

They'd laugh with me

Relating to me sincerely.

Until this parallel universe embraces

my artistry,

I'm alone in my thoughts.

Wrapped up in the equation that I cannot answer...

My past plus my present equals what?

I remember wanting to be everyone else

But myself.

I stared at the brutal Phys Ed teacher

and tried to be the athletic boy he'd admire.

Tried to take the painful hits of dodge ball

like a man.

But I was just a boy.

Who anticipated the balls would come my way.

I knew I couldn't be like the rest

I couldn't run with the herd


I had a bed full of stuffed animals

Who gave me standing ovations.

I had,

Fifty sheets of paper

With faces drawn

Journals of writing

That read like the works of a sixty year old woman.

(According to my child therapist)

I'd grow up to be a man

Without his shit together

Words still on paper

and a silent audience

of nostalgia.