AIDS DAY

Here's a poem I wrote to my friend and sometime lover in 1972, Greg Millard, who was one of the early casualties of AIDS...thinking today of him and Tim Dlugos and Joe Brainard and Cookie Mueller and so many more I loved who were casualties in that epidemic:

WATCHING YOU WALK AWAY

For Greg Millard

Today

your back, cocked hat, thick clothes for cold

the way you turned around to look again for

what? It wasn’t there last night

We were there, ‘it’ wasnt, why,     why not

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed

in each others arms

distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others

backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay

down in the dark to pick up in the morning

I like your brown eyes when you talk

you know who you are, I like your knowing this

maybe that’s not enough

Let’s talk, go to plays, see each other sometimes just to

see each other

If we lie down in each others bodies again

let it be for the music we hold

not the music we might make


(C) Michael Lally 1972