climate

you know, being an
alcoholic manic depressive homosexual
is never easy,
but one copes.
some days are easier than others.
i lucked out when the guy i fell
in love with, fell in love with me, too.
that helped a lot.
i don't know which i've been the longest:
probably i'd have to say i've been
manic depressive the longest.
after that, i figured out i was homosexual.
after that, i became an alcoholic.
there were some years in between,
a few jigs and jags,
but that's kind of the jist of things.
i'm 59 years old now.
i still remember being
a skinny sexy blond teenage boy,
naked in a secluded spot in the woods,
the sunlight on my hot young body,
my dick hard and thick
and i'm tugging on it
my pubic hair a curly frenzied restless nest
and i'm awaiting the absolute manic ecstasy
of a joyous orgasm, good and gushy
splats of cum, splatting onto
the crackly dry leaves,
there in the summer sunshine.
there've always been good times.
amongst the bad.
being an
alcoholic manic depressive homosexual
has worked out okay for me, i guess.
i sometimes think about other
ways of being in the world,
things i might have changed,
things i might still change,
but,
i'm married to a good man,
i drink what i want,
my moods don't tyrannize me
as much as they once
did,
and,
well,
after 59 years,
you sorta get used to stuff.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem first appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #9, Summer 2012.  It also appears in my book Saline, published by Interior Noise Press in 2014 and currently available from Amazon.)