Billet-doux

Dear Past Love --

This day, you came to my house after school. I don't remember what we did (probably made-out to a heavy-petting motor ballad) or if we said anything different or out of the ordinary. I know that I had to have smiled at you when you kissed me goodbye and I know that I handed you the sun to keep until the next day. But you went w/ my sun and it shattered into a million glistening shards of golden resin on the silver rails of the Lauderdale County train tracks. "Journey's end in lovers meeting" is the title of that percipient day, where the day lost its sunshiny demeanor to a clamoring void. That day we sort of became undone, our serendipity, like a lovelorn leaf ripped of a tree. And it left me feeling unseated on my knees after a twelve-paced duel. Since you've been gone, I haven't held my breath, but I've felt the ligature of outstretched shadows, where headstones lived dark, like haunting monasteries on the walls.

I can't begin to tell you why you were here or what your legacy is. I could selfishly say you were here, not to touch the earth but to touch me, that you must've been born for me, that you were made for me. But that would be me falsifying some bigger truth I'm sure, bearing false witness to your memory. I could tell you that I've changed for the better, that it propelled me into some cathartic change, that I grew from your absence. You'd have to ask for a show of miscellaneous hands there. But I can affirm and tell you that I was suffused in melancholic alibis and I wrote things of earnest despair for a while, because my self-induced perdition was persistent, in the amplified mourning or at the tumultuous end of night, vivified in about seventeen death poems a day I would guess, consumed by ineffable mannerisms of sadness. And I can tell you that my reliquary was filled w/ rueful darkness. Like this:

From darkness to darkness
my voice echoes
in the emptiness
trying to find its way

From world to world
my voice cries
for life
w/ death
lurking to prey

From light to light
my voice chants
with fear
hoping darkness
leaves me

From east to west
my voice travels
in many directions
hoping to be found

From life to death
my voice reigns confusion
wondering
which is better

From me to you
my voice falls silent
again
(1989)

Over time, in a deserted mirror, I found me, under a moonlit charade. And I suppose some age-old adage applied because I learned to not ignore love and life, because even the vulnerable clouds became studded w/ jewels. I learned to embrace it daringly and to stand in its crossfire because it was always in my face and I found myself good at it. Wholly and effortlessly. Not tramp-like, not easy, not immature-like, not free to everyone but without erect walls and without hesitation. I stopped dwelling in the habit of losing people and I stopped passing out untruthful gambits that denied love's existence. I stopped visiting the orchard of dancing silhouettes.

But I still like to be alone because the quiet swales I swim in enhance my madcap escape to a copse of dreamy isolation, where the leaden silence is instilled and where my youthful regrets w/ you probably equal that of every other flower petal pulled. I wish I had said something different that day, something more or real or knowing or believable. But if it's all the same, as poignant as I can be now, I suppose you knew I loved you innocently. First & forever. And, by the wave of God's whisper, I suppose you know I miss you.
m.

Twins

You stole my one day
I could've been born a star
You had to butt in.

Cupid's Conspiracy

Twenty-one years ago, I stopped believing in love. It was frayed, stained, broken. It was indentations from a razor blade. I lost the instinct of love. It was unrequited. It was a mirage, out of reach, distant. It was morbid self-pity isolation. It was temperamental and imitable. It was simply an indulgence. It was changing fashion. It was exploitative. I thought the word "love" was like a curse word. Or simply an unstillable curse. I thought that "I love you" was an impromptu something you said when there was nothing else on the tip of your tongue.

I imagined circumstances when one would be required to say it. Driving down the road w/ a broken radio. On a date, knocking back an aperitif, before the meal. The intermission of a Chekov play. On the balcony at a party that you want to escape. At the zoo where you adore a mischievous panda bear. While compromising over dessert. In a museum when you can't describe Vermeer's light adequately enough. When bicycling thru a maze of windmills and tulips. At a concert w/ spiraling nuances of pot in the air. When perusing a book of poetry because it inspires affection. On a dirt road because instant gratification overwhelms. At the end of a two-minute call about nothing. When trying on clothes because a new season of fashion approaches. When you receive a bouquet of flowers for no apparent reason. When playing guitars cross-legged knee to knee. While selecting foreign films at the local video store. While on a bridge debating risk. When lost in the bad bits of Marseilles. At an amphitheater where Chinese acrobats excite you. On the beach next to a no-trespassing sign. On a glass-bottom boat tour when you're too sunburned to move. While hiking toward a reticent sunset. On an idyllic hill that looks better at night than during the day. On a turbulent plane because you think you might die. Before being encumbered by sleep, after putting the quietus to a day. And on New Year's Eve because it's the thing to do.

But something happened; I saw four stenciled colors of a vibrant rainbow thru an open breeze. And I knew it was symbolic of promises and love and forever.

As a result, I wrote these little amateurish verses, Now Tell Me, in third person seventeen years ago when reality devoured my imagination. Where my imagination led to marriage, to a guy who might've thought this:

Now tell me
Who wipes your tears away
Who makes you smile on his better days

Now tell me
Who is your soul-mate
Written in the stars destiny or fate

Now tell me
Who picks you flowers
When the clouds are in your eyes

Now tell me
Who proves he loves you
When you doubt there is love at all

And I now say "I love you" when I have everything else on the tip of my tongue. Because the curse has been lifted and love reigns in irristable splendor. It's an apposite need. It's redeemable and insistent. Here I know my opinion has altered because in all of the possible places to say "I love you" I now mean it within. It's relaxing and peaceful. It's compulsive and intense. It deserves impunity. It's sacred and enviable. It's inescapable and undeniable. It's synonymous to existence. And you find it, incoherent, when you talk in your sleep, in the middle of the night, when you panic that he's not there. And you never have to say "I love you because..."

Emergency Landing

On a plane that sits atop a dark sea
it makes its way thru the tavern of night
everything quiet after gorging down
plastic wrapped food and the selection
of two year old movies but then there's me
who can never sleep while moving
on planes or anywhere for that matter.

The movement I try to pin down to quiet
rustling but then I cough and cough again
and it echoes in the cabin of sleeping souls
Where's the parachute I'll leave. I see
the stewardess give me a look of irritation
and the one next to me is repulsed
that I boarded a gelid plane w/ a fever.

I'm sorry, I had to come, I bought
a non-refundable ticket one way and
I've already turned the clock on my wrist up
so we ought to land sooner. Forgive me
but remember this -- time heals all wounds.

Scotland or Bust

Let's go to Scotland and trace our past lives. Let's go, russet autumn colors on our backs and a Scotch Whiskey Experience. Come on, Scottish ballet and the International Storytelling Festival. Please, the High Street and boutiques. Let's go, the National Galleries and gardens. Come on, rooftop restaurants and basement bars. Please, clay target shooting and photography on the beach. Highland dances and bagpipe riddles. And if not, I'll go toss the caber of rejection.

So I go.

Traveling is my blood's flow and a quiet drifter carries my soul. I can't leave it all here, all of me, can I? Yes, gypsy fortune has hold of my hand, and fortunately there is written poetry of me and foreign lands romanticizing, like the air in a bagpipe that becomes warm and encircling. Enticing and inviting and consuming and stealing and unrelenting and timeless, the edifice of land and ocean as one, intersecting convivially, in a vivid expanse of harmony. And I am hastened to keep searching for its beckoning pulse, its sweat of streams, its matinee of blue, because I haven't broken its untrammeled heart yet, not that it seems very frangilbe in its steadfast environs. Only the dying memorials have apologized, under their pallid curfews. Hand in hand, Scotland walks w/ me, under a glistening chandelier moon, and the shame burns my eyes, like low billows of monochrome smoke from a blistering yellow flame. Mother dies for me to walk next to her, though unworthy as I to imprint her soil w/ my roaming gait, and the shame covers my heart, the heavy weight of ancestry.

But I go.

That high place of mulls and inlets draws me inward, to its loched-ness embrace, where mysteries never wear thin. Or maybe it's Stevenson on the Royal Mile. Or Franz Ferdinand in a stained glass pub. Or tying tartans on sun-catching turrets. Or crop circles you can only see fully, carved on open meadow, on iris skin, after you've ascended toward space or heaven, whichever manifested first. Or the Gaelic secrets told thru the wood & mirrors in The Barony. Or the osprey because they fought extinction while wearing a migrant's crown. Or the regicide in Macbeth. Or the Frames who thought they were still in Ireland. Or Paul McCartney filming the Fool on the Hill w/ his zipper down. Or a mini-cooper w/ a proud Scottish flag painted abstractly on top. Or blackface sheep, like trembling rock stars, singing long vibrato notes that float away. I would like to elucidate the rationale better; all I can say is I am so inclined. And I crave somewhere else to hike, a new dominion, the range of motion I have to live in. Perhaps I will reconnoiter twisty paths w/out a compass and dangle my feet over an overhung ocean, while pressed hyacinth colors my hair, and where I can drop American coins just to hear their rush. And then I'll scrape the word "nostalgia" on a thick tree.

With sgian dubh on right leg, I go.