"Peter is a queer psychotherapist, previously working in community mental health and HIV/AIDS, now in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. He is the author of two books, Gay Fairy Tales (HarperSanFranciso 1995) and Gay Folk and Fairy Tales (Faber and Faber, 1997)"
Keepsakes
The boxes of things taped and saved from three moves back,
Library of every book,
Jewel box of keepsakes,
Files on the hard drive,
Email archive,
Journals of then what happened,
Way we’ve thought of ourselves since in our 20s,
Chronicle of how things work compiled over decades,
Soul made by pacing the earth,
Spirit distilled drop by drop from every lived instant,
Mind risen from traffic on neural roadways,
Body of cellular billions built live from molecules,
And what shall we hope for?
That these things
Enter the permanent collection
And we be their museum forever?
Or to be relieved of them?
To be where the old apartment building stood,
Where the breeze comes and goes
And nothing stops it.
Multiverse
Somewhere in the brain we live other lives,
Haven’t left our hometown, married differently,
Didn’t stop for a drink driving home that night,
We did or didn’t catch that disease,
Weren’t quite quick enough and got hit by that car,
Didn’t survive the injuries, died,
There was or was not an afterlife, we burned
Forever in hell, reincarnated again, again,
Resolved into recyclables, zeroed in oblivion.
So many options. No escapes.
That multiverse they talk about? That’s us
Spreading out through it all at the speed of light,
Already everywhere, being human, what it means.
The Departed
They come back and slowly heal
From what they died of, the disease,
Dementia, even the despair
That found relief in suicide.
Slowly they regain themselves,
The ones we loved, who they’d been,
Who they were becoming when
What happened to them happened,
Their humor or their certainty,
That delicate not reproduced
Way in which they met the world
That never fully registered
In our knowing—here again
As if having gone as far
Away from us as they could go
There’s nothing left but to return.
But before they can come back
They first must leave for good, into
We never will see them again
And we learn to live without
Who we cannot live without.
