The Vancouver Initiative for AIDS Innovation

  Donnie, we counted the days
’til your death
  by tulip spears and lily bayonets.
  I last saw you in a has-been
  coat – fox fur – always a scene –
on 17th Ave in November.
  Your bare feet in pumps
  breath aerosol with alcohol and smoke.
  Kiss me my blue balled cowboy
my boy toy
  my call boy.
  Wasn’t AIDS fucked your head
  but ten years of coke.

If you read poetry (you didn’t)
  you might know Lorca (you wouldn’t)
  rode a horse of pearl –
  a horse rode hard
and put away wet.
  His took less time than yours
  but obeyed all the rules
  of fagot death – here’s the rhyme –
a gun blew the maricón rojo
  all over the avenue.

  Donnie, my disease Argonaut
  fleecing the golden pubes
my barber of the uncivil
  my resurrected stiff
  drag drags on
  even amongst the dead.
So I want you as you weren’t
  not your second coming
  a protease tease
  in a 90 pound
negligee of sweat
  and black sarcoma lace –
  so late 1980s.
  Lypo, pills, tubes, the shits,
is it a eulogy
  if we wished you death?

© Shane Rhodes