Florida Again 

                              I forgave myself for having had a youth.
					            —Thom Gunn

At the Fashion
Square mall,
back
of Waldenbooks,

I saw my younger self
haunting
the magazine rack.
Ripping out pages

of Blueboy,
tucking them 
in a Trapper
Keeper.

Turn back.
His eyes met mine,
animal
and brittle,

a form
of gratitude
that a man
kept his stare.

Any man.
I half-smiled
some admission,
and though

he couldn’t
see it coming,
I excused him
his acid jeans;

two Swatch
watches,
two guards.
He, I,

must have been
nineteen:
sex was “safer”
then—

scribbles
on the mall
men’s room stall;
malaise

of saxophone
and PSAs.
How
did I

even
learn how to live
in 1991?
Landlocked,

cock-blocked,
Spanish moss
festering.
I forgive him.
Credit

Copyright © 2018 by Randall Mann. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 1, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“I was recently in a mall bookstore, and as I watched the men shift and avert their eyes in front of the porno mags, I remembered doing much the same thing in Florida, the desolation and excitement of trying to get a glimpse of something illicit and queer—and I felt an overwhelming sense of tenderness toward my younger self. The epigraph and, to some extent, formal structure of the poem come from Gunn's ‘Talbot Road.’”
—Randall Mann