There is a steady stream, almost a triumphant parade
Of stumbling buffoons like crumbs along the sidewalk,
A constant flow of retards in whom
I have no interest, no common thread.
I would like for them all to learn how to walk
Or, better, to evaporate into a cloud of subpar intelligence,
Then rain back down, purified into sophisticates.
I remember when this happened,
When this lack of romanticism became a real void in my soul.
It was down that long, empty, straight line of two-lane highway outside Pekin,
When I was trying to force myself to cry,
Expecting that those tears would send up some kind of primordial beacon;
Expecting my phone to ring.
But had he called then, as I wept myself away from him,
It would have been just the other side of too late. It wouldn't have really hurt.
I'd have flown back to him, dried those homing beacon tears,
Curled up inside him if he'd let me,
And settled into his chest cavity,
A blight and an emptiness already, but trying to force the sweetness he'd used up,
Wanting and working to recreate a childhood whimsy
With no whim to build on.
It had been a long time coming, this stony gaze of mine.
Chinks in my soft, fleshy armor had appeared long before.
The bitter Midwestern winters had whipped away the baby smoothness,
And the abandonment of a dear friend had formed a few scales.
But the coldness in my blood was just cooling down;
I was tepid, I guess.
But those wild moments in the middle of the blackest plains nights,
The feel of him near me, the memories crashing into foam against the present...
It was enough to make me feel again the the rush of my unfettered self,
To cry and to
mean it. To want something so deeply I felt myself cave in around its absence. To explode into pinpoints of starlight with someone. Or even alone. To wonder at those stars, and try to discern them.
I nursed the possibility of keeping myself as raw as he made me.
I thought of it as I walked to work.
I wrote feverishly, painted nightly.
Listened to out-of-control music too loud.
Even as he drew away, and the coldness of my lonely living room floor stared back at me, so beige it made me spill paint all over it to love it again,
I relived those moments on the wide open prairie, wedged a lump in my throat to keep myself wide open, too.
But the baby-soft skin was shed, the scales and reptilian slowness were creeping in,
Along with an indifference I felt in return for him but pushed down beneath the joy.
I needed this feeling, this ululation and terror, I thought. It kept me young.
And then that night, alone and frightened in a foreign room, it snapped.
The grey force of reverse evolution, the fighting force in my genes overtook idealism,
And down came the high hopes, stifling the wind in my hair and plugging up the leaks in my eyes.
I stopped crying for him. I stopped crying for anyone.
Unexpected phone calls and the occasional reverie
Will bring a far-away tension in my guts even now,
A kind of echo of something that once was,
And was something that is far past the word "glorious,"
Up there in the realm of Biblical awe.
There was this feeling in me, for him, for the world through all that I felt.
But these days,
With the idiots bumping into me in the almost-as-bitter New York winter,
The crush of holiday crowds drowning out the sparkles of expectation,
I feel it really only now and then, in goosebumps,
And often, ice-pick-like, in the glittering of her eyes.
Posts
