An FU to the Men in Blue

Abstract

An FU to the Men in Blue James Shultis (bio) When walking down hallways we stutter + sputter in the light. The bodies, our bodies some human oddity some sort of cultural tourism we don’t get tipped for, only tried. And the policeman beckons me with his badge + pistol in pocket. And do I ask you about your cock while working trying to get to know you. When really I should just let you be. But yer a cop with a pistol + it’s easy to bother you right? Pad me down + tell me that it’s all alright. And how lucky I am to have a girlfriend, that she’s just fine with the way my body does not stand the way your body stands. That I am a boy + yes I am okay with it. What I shoulda said. What I shoulda said would’ve been along the lines of “FU mister New York blue, I am not what you would expect”; but instead all the lights are burning on hot, scalding skin like electroshock you shook shook me quick with all the things you shouldn’ta said. Midnight Beehive Bike Battle We are the children of that night, that eclipses into a strange circumference of moon + sun. It’s when we pull our hoods on riding over time + bridges like they are our own deliverances, when I fall apart. When my feet hit the ground, suddenly synthesizing air + light + all those little poems that run through my head, some mantra, some sick trick to make me hypnotized, hit the road, fly, as quick as my feet can take me. We are a traveling kind, marking miles with scars from battles we’ve barely won. Raw knuckles scuff pavement. The music, that music of heavy breaths heaving over a heavier chest. My body is your body, is a battlefield of injections + rejections + declarations of love that come to me by one million hands that want to touch. Forget the sins that come through blinds in morning, in mourning + take forbidden pictures, that become installations, distillations of what a body, mine, is slowly forgetting its been. This boy, that girl in the dark. [End Page 144] Soon the scars don’t show, soon they’re barely there at all + we fill our names quick on yr form, with a pen that has marked the decisions that came before. The ink running the same direction as my bike, the same way my face flies into the distance till all we’ve got left is this city in memory. This beehive city of too much sound. [End Page 145] James Shultis James Shultis is a Brooklyn-based poet with a collection of bikes and too many gardening supplies. He keeps various notebooks full of his top-fives, grocery lists, scribble-scrabble, love notes, poems + snippets of stories. He is a recent graduate of Hunter College, where he studied creative writing and gender studies. In the fall, he will be beginning an MFA in poetics at Queens College. His other work can be seen at http://www.jamesshultis.com . Copyright © 2008 Victoria Pitts-Taylor & Talia Schaffer