I undulate in
hypothetical assertion on if we have met, passed, or spoken. Although possible whether I wish this
instigation to be present in tangible reality I am bewitched on what side of the
seesaw of hope the impetus would fall: hopeful or less. This being the nature of the mind preoccupied
with what is beyond control bearing meaning on this present moment, where I am
most assured I am clueless as to your whereabouts, aroma, or eccentric
peculiarities and why when we do ignite this brushfire it will blaze triumphant
in that undaunted form of presence.
Mercurial laughter a
gas of intoxicating waft as once I begin to smile at you there is that notion
of how can you help yourself but reciprocate into a widening, an opening to
what is offered as if natural and rambunctiously combustible into laughter, wanton
debaucheries of wildfire laughter seeping into complexion and sexual frivolity
tickling the dermis to percolate as this is the moment. This is lightning like liquid sky plasma
arcing into the spirituality of dragon heartstring wands making magic in the
way one human peers into the eyes of another. This is saying I and you know there is no one,
no perfect, no only, but we might be able to treat each other as if that were
true, priority not in some worship of sexual monogamy equals success preached
by the ego, but love is free choice made in so many complex tendrils and divots
and not the truncation of carnal desire encapsulated in a single physical
body. We can fuck in fervent abandon and
entwine stories until dawn sewing cloth for winters and dancing nude in
springs. There is a staying warm and
being free, security and liberation in duality, this is the grand parade.
There is the mother
of woven blanket hopes in the paradigms of fate, karma, faith, and the
nurturing fertilizers of kindness, dreaming, and planted seeds that a moment of
burgeoning like this could ever be.
There is the father of my rigid metal armor that stoically metastasizes
my bronchiole cells into cancerous heaviness to lift the bagpipes of body to
breathe the audacity to hope for such planetary alignments. There is the child in me toying that seesaw
inside the lightness and the heaviness for which man to be and I pray your eyes
find the feathered truth and taste my body naked.
I recollect a
quartet of women who taught me how to be a lover, the others like nibbling
minnows, but these women were the tarpon and swordfish, the majestic surface
bursting bullheaded beauties capable of making this body rethink where he
wanted to go, who he wanted to be, formational type of scale issues where after
I was a molted sun-organism evolving out of the water, processing how to breath
the staggering notion of air welled inside another’s lungs. Falling brilliantly and yet, here writing
this love letter to you like the Old Man and the Sea, Ahab and Thoreau in his
garden seeing this natural eruption fracture the lines of what I expect to
become, not knowing if I will be destroyed, saved, or enraptured, I am trying
to picture your face as I have a thousand times before in gray percolated midnights.
I speak to you over
the lid of my pillow in the sterile darkness holding courtship in conversation
under the guise that one day we may pass out from behind the veil into
identities; that you had to complete some lily-pad tie-toe, mud-slop stomp, fire-pit
dash as I have to be in a specific moment of encounter. That no matter how the mirror fissures into
the warmest refracted colors that this sail cloth inside me is filled by that
notion that brought Odysseus home. Maybe
it is to madness or crestfallen umbrage in the way the die will be cast, but
there is unction in those twilight conversations echoing that maybe there will
be time. Maybe there will be time for
you and me. Not for perfection, but for
being, simply being.
This battery of barracudas
cannot peck all my flesh. Hair is a nest
of gray. Sex is tantric and shared, but
I know none of it has been you. I am not
sure if I have ever felt reciprocated love.
I think I am getting closer to forty years old, which if I am blessed
may be half.
One of my greatest
inspirations to learn how to write was a teacher who gave me a 1992 USA hockey
team puck as a Senior Awards Breakfast trophy for my contributions to our
creative writing class. I keep it on my
desk. He taught me about Kenneth Patchen
and Alan Ginsberg. He was divorced and
the brutality of it puffed out in his cigarettes while on yard duty. He remarried in his fifties, was in love and
I went to see him play Dylan songs at the Neutral Ground on Danneel
Street. She got a brain aneurysm, died
on him like a shark swallowing her end of the row boat. He had a few years and was back to that
nothing. I remember going over to his
house in my college years, the lights low and he offered apple pie out the
fridge. It was cold and firm and I had
high school-nothing to say to the man.
He died of cancer a month after my wife walked out on our family. I was thirty, his funeral and I could not
face being dumbstruck again.
Love can be a god damn
son of a bitch. Everybody has their
briars and ponds with ice too thin to skate, but we try. We slide the puck and we fall and like some
kind of American god maybe there is a dark secret at the bottom of that lake we
just can’t face, but maybe when I talk to you when I peer into those waters,
maybe I can see love, to feel on par, to have my person to swim with, to crack
my fist against that ice, tread out that water, inhale that great big
blasphemous breath, look you in eyes, and finally know what to say.
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