Two Men Cum Together

I kiss the dew from your lips,
pausing to revel in the moonlight
glistening on the yielding treasure of you,
anticipating the paradise of
the cool of the desert night yielding to the melting sun.
“Do not tarry, my love,” you murmur.
“I see the oasis and the flow of the fountain
just ahead, just there, nearly within reach.
I am almost there.
Come with me.”
Over you, around you, inside you,
I resume the journey to paradise.
Over you, around you, inside you,
we ride, ride, ride from the desert of mounted desire
toward the oasis of erupting release.
The plane hit a bit of turbulence and the paper the poetry was written on fluttered to the floor. It took me a bit of digging to retrieve it and slip it back into my notebook. I’d only read the stanzas I had because it had slipped into my lap earlier. Turning toward the window, I could still see the quilt-like pattern of the towns and fields of southern France. We were still climbing in altitude in the flight from Paris to Cairo, though, and it wouldn’t be long until we were too far up in the atmosphere’s vapor to see land even on a day this clear.
I don’t know why I brought the poem with me. I intended to leave it at home. I’m not sure how it got left in the notebook I was taking. It was even more a mystery why I was going to this symposium on Arab literature in Cairo. I had declined earlier invitations to return to Cairo. I’d intended on never going back—back to the man, Afram Garfeh, the famed Egyptian poet, who had penned this poem two decades earlier. For me.
Afram hadn’t invited me to the symposium—as far as I knew—but surely he’d be there and he’d know that I was coming. We had conversed over the...