WARNING: EXPLICIT IMAGERY & COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE

"i believe you" : Show Me Your Life, Sexwork

these are the people... we do not exist familiar in any room/ as long as we remain invisible, you never have to look at our little black books/ at who our tricks were (in some cases still are)/ their husbands and their fathers and their brothers and their girlfriend’s husband, too, and their ministers and their doctors and their stockbrokers and their cops and their politicians and their bosses and their co-workers and their colleagues and their priests and the people they tell their secrets to/ these are the people who pay to fuck us/

"turning tricks when you have hiv" by tim barrus, 2011

turning tricks when you have hiv is no small accomplishment/

not that anyone in paris cared that year/

at fourteen, he was not grown enough to be the river king/

what can i say other than we needed the money/

all we have to do is jerk off into the river/

the seine was a knot of flames that year/

i am black myself because the light got ragged from fighting with the stars/

they were older men/

older than i was anyway/

who had seen tristan’s videos the way a sorrowful noise flies overhead and beyond my parisian windows/

i was not the one who made the arrangements/

i am innocent of that/

but no, i am the one who that year spent (spends) all the money/

money that we needed/

doing tricks with hiv is not unlike a car crash bursting into blue just as it gets sucked up by the sun/

no one has to touch anyone/

tristan said/

knowing my complete aversion to being touched/

not that i had not done tricks before/

dragging myself into their houses and their lives/

it’s just that, at some moment while you are pushed up as far as it will go into the trick’s ass, time becomes an ancient circle/

but this would not be like that, tristan said/

they just want us to stand at the edge of the bridge and jerk off into the seine/

it would be late at night/

they would be in the shadows which was where they lived/

nothingness in conflict with the dust that year/

i could tell you that fields grow fast, and that i did not want to do this/

but it was a lot of money, and no one had to touch anyone which is the best kind of sex anyone can have/

doing tricks with hiv lives somewhere as an idea (you do not have to act on) between wisdom and oblivion/

why us/

and why us when no one knows anything about us/

because you are a bloodstained stillness, and i am a famous whore, tristan said/

attempting to convince me we should commit this crime (it had to be a crime) as if in sudden fascination/

whose stillness in the pull of gravity would be more lucrative than reading our poetry in bookstores/

hiv is this forever bitter everything is over and is as savage as the taste of slavery that lives between your legs like soap/

i was too old and tristan was too young and the tricks (there was a group of them) were envious of sacrifice and of the dead/

the corpses from the void who would wheel among the lepers, oh, that would be us in our starry nights of mutiny and auction/

we could always fill our pockets with stones and jump into the blackness like the sky had opened up/

it’s true that i had suckled tristan riddled with arrows driven into his dependence on upturned eyes imploring him to stop/

this flowing of the currents that crossed a gunmetal sky sleek with meanness and dark with ink/

there was the blood, the sepulcher, and then there was the money/ 

an autumn night of cuming on a bridge/

our seed that year into the black flowing bloom below/

i was not the famous one whose stars are always rigid with mirage and tricks upon the travelers/

my stars were molded by the memory of tongues/

i am a shallow man and did not tell tristan i am impotent/

maybe no one would notice/

a void unfastened not in collision but in a burst of tristan’s cum like satan feasts among the maggots long before they sprout their wings/

i never saw the tricks/

i only felt them somewhere out there hiding in a thousand prophecies and wanting to scream but holding it/

we had decided we would wear leather and just take our cocks out (the people on the bridge walked by quietly smiling and pretending not to see) as if the warm weather had arrived (it hadn’t) and all of us were lost/

lost into a yielding and take another pill you eyeless dolls/

the dogs were cold and i was scowling when tristan came — came like — breeding on the ragged edge of metallic bridges paid for by the golden coins he was always biting with his perfect teeth that year/

his cum of fire and virus incriminating reclamation of a sum totaled sterling circumnavigation that had turned not maelstrom black but dispensed into a midnight marketplace of riverwombs gone blue as a dutchman’s eyes swing from side to side like two stones whose fate had always been the bottom of a well/