Farewell to a Model

You’re tired of me and done with this, my trying
to build you up by showing you how strong
you look as a saint in the Academic style,
talking you up with such passion while painting
in hope you’d find in being depicted
as someone worthy of adoration
a refuge from your drinking and your dope.

Now in the wake of being lightly robbed
and rebuked again, sketching from memory
a few more late-night portraits of you
you wouldn’t think much of, and I’ll rip up
tomorrow, I blame myself for pretending to
a kindness that intended less to enchant
than to protect you, as though with my own hands

I might suppress forces I presumed to argue
with you could kill you. Rightly you weren’t
persuaded I meant by this I cared about just you.
I’ve seen too many young men die unhaloed,
everyone left behind in some part guilty
of failing to convince them of their beauty,
and each one, like the first one, one too many.

But what am I doing, drawing this to a close?
It’s you that I adore. Why have I turned into
the kind of scold that you grew up against --
the father figure who withheld his love
for never being in control of you, who made
a codependent man of you, then set you free.
Come back, is all I want to say right now,

and come of age again before my eyes.
And maybe in a night or two, the way it’s been,
you will. And what I’ll try to tell you then,
if so, is that I’ve feared to feel till now
another love that’s unconditional
for someone younger I might well outlive
and why you are too beautiful for words.

First published in Vol. 2 of the Muswell Press, UK, anthology series,
Queer Life, Queer Love