Melodramatic Stroboscopic Picture Show In Words: A Love Affair

She had always been unhappy. And it couldn’t be helped. He loved her. And it couldn’t be helped. She fought with him that he didn’t really love her. And it couldn’t be helped. He fought back with her that he really did. And it couldn’t be helped. For ages she told him that they needed to take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. And for ages he resisted her saying that they needed take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. To try to spice things up between them, she brought an old sex book she had owned to his bed. And it couldn’t be helped. He tried to ignore the oily stains that had been on the book’s cover. And it couldn’t be helped.

She told him all her problems she had with life the next day on the phone for half an hour. It couldn’t be helped. Unable to speak a single word himself, he listened to her problems and felt exasperated listening. It couldn’t be helped. The next day after that, she did it again, filling him with her problems. It couldn’t be helped. He felt beside himself, listening again. It couldn’t be helped. She felt that they were finally at a new beginning, that she was opening up to him again. It couldn’t be helped. He told her that they needed to take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She broke down and sobbed. It couldn’t be helped. He listened to her sobbing for an hour on the phone. It couldn’t be helped.

The next day, he sought to recant their taking a break. It couldn’t be helped. She denied his request that they not take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She skipped his birthday when it came. It couldn’t be helped. He felt pain. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages indicating that she was inclined to let the whole thing go. It couldn’t be helped. He panicked and missed her terribly. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him a picture of her wearing his locket. It couldn’t be helped. He felt love seeing her wearing the locket, the same one which he wore, too. It couldn’t be helped. She messaged him a picture of her engagement ring, now carefully placed in a little house of sticks and bark and stone he had once built for it for her. It couldn’t be helped.

He felt love for her, holding onto hope from that sweet picture. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more texts telling him she couldn’t talk. It couldn’t be helped. He felt despair. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages that she felt relieved and had discovered a new, happy social life. It couldn’t be helped. He felt deeper and deeper loneliness, missing her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him messages that said she would let him him know when she could talk to him. It couldn’t be helped. He respected her request for space. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more messages telling him to let it be. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that told her he loved and missed her. It couldn’t be helped.

She sent him messages indicating that she had no intention of returning to their relationship the way it was. It couldn’t be helped. He felt some hope, that indeed they could change the way their relationship had been. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that she wanted their relationship to be over. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that indicated he was lonely and missed her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that said she was worried about him but would not help him. It couldn’t be helped. He arranged with her to pick up his belongings at her house. It couldn’t be helped. She agreed and told him she did not want to see him and to be gone with his belongings by the afternoon. It couldn’t be helped.

He was stunned to find every stitch and scrap, from his tube of face moisturizer that had been in his drawer in the bathroom, to his running shoes in the closet, had been already neatly bagged and boxed in the little, dark room he had worked in down her basement when he got there. It couldn’t be helped. She weeks before had removed from her sight any sign and any remnant ever associated with him from her house. It couldn’t be helped. After packing all his belongings into his car, he bought and lay dozens of roses for her in her house—in hallways, in the kitchen, on the staircase, upon her bed, and wrote her short love notes telling her he would do anything to be with her again, and drove away. It couldn’t be helped.

After therapy and work, she came home and changed out of her work clothes to go out with her date for dinner. It couldn’t be helped. After he had left, he had turned back to see her in person and to beg her to speak with him. It couldn’t be helped. Having left the front and the back doors of her house flung open, she shouted down the staircase from her bedroom that she would be right there. It couldn’t be helped. He’d rapped on the back glass door, just open enough, and called out to her. It couldn’t be helped. She came downstairs and when she saw him, she screamed and screamed and screamed. It couldn’t be helped. He followed her outside where she was screaming and screaming to her car. It couldn’t be helped.

She screamed and screamed for him to leave her alone. It couldn’t be helped. He begged her on his knees, “Please! Please! Please!” It couldn’t be helped. Her date appeared behind him in the driveway and claimed the police were on their way. It couldn’t be helped. While he believed this was not true, he also didn’t care if it had been. It couldn’t be helped. She ran to her date’s car waiting for her on the street. It couldn’t be helped. Afterwards, he struggled and fought for her for weeks. It couldn’t be helped. She held her ground against him. It couldn’t be helped. He sneaked into his friend’s house nearby who had plenty of guns and put a bullet through his beautiful head. It couldn’t be helped.

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance: B-Side

She mourned the recent death of her fiancé by going out on dates. That is how she grieved. For there was no use hanging around and moping. There was no use feeling sorry for him or for herself. She deserved a life of joy and joyfulness. After all, wasn’t that what the tattoo on her backside read in Latin, just above her buttocks in permanent  blue: “Inveniens Gaudium”? And the truth was, he hadn’t been the showboat anyway of her life. Judgmental and cruel at times, he could walk the rice paper path like a monk and never leave a trace. But, the truth was really in his essence: boy-like, full of wonder, like an Elephant’s Child’s mind full of “insatiable curiosity.” If one were to pass out gold stars for good human behavior with strangers, many a new star-lit constellations would fill the painted skies.

Almost everybody who met him had left him blinking their eyes in open human wonder and delight. In supermarkets, barber shops, railway stations. That was how he was, touched with a lightness of being and gaiety that was like the cheerful song of birds. These ways of his would not stop her for a moment, however. She’d dine, and undress, and pull through a continuous orgasm of amazing sex without him. No use sitting on the shelf like unused bed sheets and turning gray and brittle there for nothing like that innocent lost girl folding linen warns against in that poem by Brecht, who instead was destined to live her own life to the fullest, and be a woman completely manifest. No sense in hanging onto the past. It was just as Jesus had said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

And besides, where had he been for her? What had he done for her lately?  Fuck  Eddie Murphy! He’d done nothing. He hadn’t been there. When she was down and in need, where was he for her then? True, he had once repaired and painted white her crumbling garage; he had once patched her roof; he had once changed the basement pump; he had for a spell from time to time minded her children when she had slipped into the coma of her depressions. True, he had battled off her irrational and abusive ex (chronic guilty reminder of her past life mired in poor choices, sickness, mistakes & misdirection). True, he had protected her from her mother’s mania (who’d beaten her to tears as no child a mother ever should). True, he had amused her boys endlessly every night at supper (when at the table she had been a maternal ghost). So what!

He had been such a bastard. Her past was her past. He was always judging her by that. That was who she had been then. She had changed, she had changed, she had changed. And where the fuck was he? Last winter, he had abandoned her, abandoned her when she had really, really needed him. He had abandoned her! She had been all alone. He’d just come on the weekends and fuck her and leave, leaving her alone again. She didn’t need a man like that. He hadn’t been her partner like that. That’s not a partner.

She would find a man who loved her the way she deserved. Where had this dead fiancé whose diamond ring (which she had bought with her own hard-earned money) that she wore for nothing for the four years they were engaged for nothing who would never have married her anyway been? She was an ageless goddess. She, without him, was an amazing, powerful woman who had now become fully herself. She was an amazing, phenomenal woman. She’d enjoy her life for what it was—“Life as itself now,” and sleep with and date and fuck and love again whosoever she pleased. Whether he’d been dead two months, two years, or a day, what difference did it make?

Twinkling Morning Sigh

After four years she told him that the sparkle she had hoped would happen didn’t. He went to pick up his pajama tops, his bicycle in the garage, and a handful of crystals that did.

Jump Here!

Now this old piece of lie, so the story goes, so the story went, it went something like this. She’d walk there and he’d walk there and then they’d get to this point on the concourse or the causeway or what have you, and as they were approaching, and this was years back, mind you, he’d go to her: “How many days would you remember me if I jumped off right here?” And she’d go something like 58 days, or a week, or 29 hours, or some such reply. And it was all in good, suicidal fun, you see. It wasn’t expected of him to jump for anything. After all, the one that had been on the brinks, the one that had been in the bin, wasn’t him. The one that loved life, why, everybody you had talked to always knew it was him. Her? Well, enough said there. There was enough medical documentation in the files to keep the Easter Bunny happy till Christmas. Of course nobody’d suspected that he’d had such a deep down mordant sense of humor that went quite that deep. But when you look at the crack in the cement, and you come to realize that through freezing and thawing, through freezing and thawing, expanding and contracting the way water does year after year, season after season, it does things to a story-teller’s own mind. See, they’ve got a mind like no other. What they think is funny, like D. B. Cooper with the made-up middle initial like that, is not as funny as it is to other people to whom story-telling is not an art but just a thing to pass the time with, you know, make a marriage go on with destroying each other in a few years. For most people, stories are just like going to the movies. They’re just entertainment. But to other people, why, they are as earnest as coyote’s eyes glowing in the dark. They’ve got a special kind of intelligence, not like IQ-wise, but another kind a lot more seeing and a lot more important than that. They can see themselves in the hunt of things, just way the coyote slipping past the last cool air of dawn most certainly smells if it cannot exactly see its own natural destiny whilst in the midst of being that very destiny. So, too, is the earnestness of the story-teller. And the way it goes, she had said forty-four days. “I will remember you,” she had said, “forty-four days after you jump.” So it got to thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and when it was forty-four, that was pretty much the end of it.

Amour Tunisienne

Before my life’s second half, before the obvious Inferno-rift, which involved my sitting in a dusty armchair on the banks of Lake Champlain after squandering the first half my life, after causing as much suffering and committing, as Saint Paul would have it, enough sin to people a small South American village a couple of times over, before the second half of my life I was asleep. Only when I smelled the cheap dust in a badly upholstered armchair of three homosexual friends who took me under their wing for several months, who fed and housed me in Vermont out of charity and love for me for seven months, maybe it was eight; only then, when I read Dante—and this is the truth—did I wake up from having been an extremely talented waste.

Before inhaling the good filthy dust of an orange-thatched armchair on Lake Chaplain, and being left alone to think and be and masturbate and be, above all, listened to by three men, before I inhaled the filth of Vermont, I was asleep. Over awful pork dinners, over awful pot roasts, over bread-crumb soaked fat-dripping bacon-laid meatloaves that made me sick to have on the tip of my fork, and which, because these male friends were all gay and gallant and generous, who was I in the crapped up shoes I was wearing to have turned down the three gay g’s, even if the last of the triplet is soft? I was in no position to do anything but refuse or submit to their months of dusty love. I could never call them, they called themselves Peter, Paul, and Mary, which was a cute and apt gay joke we kept up for the entirety of my visit; I never called them by their real names, and won’t, out of my love for them. I won’t call them by their real names here in this reckoning. I loved all three and couldn’t criticize their dinner food that was dripping with fat, soaked in animal grease. I can’t even say what they called me. It wasn’t polite. But I won’t say. Some things, even in a perfect reckoning, must remain silent; some things must ever remain silent. That’s the way I am. That’s the way I have always been.

All I have left, for example, from my amour Tunisienne is a little brass plate, an ashtray really, and a single photograph, which, since I never take pictures, I have no pictures of my loves, is exceptional. For me it is taboo. I will say as little as possible about my amour Tunisienne, not out of shyness, not out of shame, not out of guilt, not out of pride. I will not name her. People I have loved I never name. The only external reminder I have of my amour Tunisienne is a small brass ashtray, a souvenir plate, with her name’s meaning, along with other arabesque designs, banged into the side, banged into the lip. Her name means star. I may point to every constellation I know of in the heavens; with my etymological wand I may point to her name itself; I may indicate it with the index of translation; but I will never say it. Somewhere in my lifelong heap of junk I have this plate with her name hammered into the side of it in English capital letters, in, I should say, a Roman alphabet, a small gift she passed to me sometime before our clandestine love affair was discovered by her older brother.

I have been mad about women all my life; for me, as others bend their knee to the Cross, I lower myself to women. As others seek spiritual salvation through Christ, my life has been a Golgotha of women. Everywhere on this hill of skulls, my loves are crucified. Everywhere on this bloody hill of women there is another lover. My journey to the divine heart has been through women, from my earliest teens, when I was a doubtful American thrown on the white coral beaches of Carthage, where along the promenade at vespers young girls walked their light-brown arms wrapped around each other’s waists, down and up the red-tiled promenade above the Mediterranean Sea, their unheard voices drowned out by the skulk and shuffle of matchstick-striking boys leering here and there, like me. All my life I have lit matches, and struck them before the faces of illuminated women. In Carthage and elsewhere, much of my life has been a discovery of the divine through an ongoing and endless crucifixion of feminines. It is the only way I seem to learn. Through loss I have learned and through loss gained everything.

Just last year I traveled to a local film screening and, seeing a seat free beside a young woman, asked her if she minded my sitting beside her. Shortly after welcoming me to the seat, she put out her hand and greeted me with her name. Establishing within the several minutes before the screening room darkened about us an intimacy of names and places, more than just her raw beauty itself, to which I am and always have been irrevocably attracted, the shaded salience of a cheekbone, the knobbed attenuated wrist bared at the cuff, the smell of beauty, that sweet unguent of salt and water and grease, it is a smell itself that draws me in like the word itself love uttered by another before me, more than just the similar social accents exchanged between us, I was lost to my now perpetual silence. While I later, the next day in fact, sent to this lovely young woman, whose surname and town in which she lived she had given to me, a copy of the extant text of the great poet-lover Sappho, marking the spot with a yellow autumn leaf where on the right-hand page the English reads the English, and on the left-hand page reads the Greek, I will never hear from her again, I will never in daylight see her.

That it was my desire to do so, though it was my desire to see her again, though in her beauty and youth was awakened in me the rapture of Carthage, though my heart could recall the scandaled bliss of placing my hand on my amour Tunisenne’s right knee seated on the filthy curb of an urban street, in Tunis itself, where we had conspired to create our lovers’ tryst, though next to my own smell of my own nose crammed into my own armpit, though besides my own the salted aromas of this movie girl’s body filling up my lips with blood puffed they were the best ever I smelled once in my life, though I felt the urges of a lifetime to compose a thousand poems and shred them to papered fragments to be mulched by the promiscuous woods and pulped by the greasy and slimy estuaries besides which we all live, I could guess even then, when I know nothing of propriety, when I go through the mere motions of manner and propriety, when the coattails of my upright social upbringing are grabbed onto; when, if, for example, to note an entering female I turn the entirety of my albeit squat, foreshortened torso about, rather than cranking around the hairy uncouth knob of my flustered head to view the entrant; when my true barbaric self behind a knoll lies half-hidden and I pretend that outwardly I am the handsome JFK, when this collision happens, when I am neither half the one nor half the other, when both exterminate the other, when I mentioned to this great young beauty whose oily breasts were a button away the poet-goddess Sappho just before the darkness of the movie theatre descended and she knew nothing of Sappho, the name itself was foreign, unheard of, even then I knew in my shivers that I should never meet her again. Throughout the dark screening, my left hand cupping the armrest, I felt her breath exhaled on my warmed fingers. Being placed on the face pointing downwards the nose is such a funny thing, I thought: made to send messages of love even the sender may not comprehend, understand, or even know of. Phoenician thrown from a cliff my love is fallen down to a nameless purple sea.

I will never say to the world the name of my amour Tunisienne or the name of the young movie girl. The one I knew in my teens, the other in my fifties. It is all the same to me, and I have never let a truth in my heart be corrupted by naming it. The particular province of men, to name, is one I have steered away from in my life. To have records of my life runs counter to everything I believe in. Only were I sure that a lover were to be a lover for life would I take her picture. That is why my amour Tunisienne is such an exception. Her picture, which I snapped at a careless moment, I don’t have the impulse to destroy, nor do I wish to keep it. I would never snap the picture of a woman unless I knew I were to spend my entire life with her. That has, except for this one exceptional picture, been my lifelong credo. I have, except for this one picture, been faithful to it. I have no pictures of any of my lovers, not one of them, except of course for the amour Tunisienne.

In the picture, it is actually a picture of her and me, we are standing next to each other, I with my arm hung atop her shoulder, and she with her arm held loose around my waist. Her older sister, Jemullah, which means beautiful, took it. We are smiling. I cannot bear to look at it. Even my memory of it makes me sad. When I look at that picture in my memory, I am saddened forever by how happy I am. I cannot bear to have dozens of pictures like this. So, I have none. Pictures of happiness would be impossible to live by. So, I have none. The idea of pictures of happiness reminds me of the life they represent as no longer being so. So, these pictures represent a life that is false. Pictures represent falsehood. So, I cannot bear any of them. This is especially true for the dozens of pictures of women I have loved. I cannot bear to see any of them. It would be suicidal for me to have kept pictures of my loves. They would have made me feel false, and, therefore, suicidal. So, except for the amour Tunisienne, whose existence has been a silent curse throughout my life, and which I never will destroy, I have not taken any pictures of women and therefore have not been faced again ever with keeping or not keeping some. I have made it perfidious to take and therefore keep any. I have made it sacrilege. I have paid homage to all the women I have loved by not taking and not keeping their pictures.

This, really, is my only religion, it is my only constant lifelong practise. In everything else, I have lived in violation, a sort of violation that at times has been steadfast and at others not. But, in any case, I have lived a life continuously filled with violations, and every violation is a violation of love. The one aspect of my life which I have not violated is the taking of pictures, except for my amour Tunisienne. Excepting her, I have all my life been steadfast and true to this one reigning principle: never to take the picture of a woman whom I did not doubt I would know forever. In this, except for the Tunisienne, a plague to me, I have been true. To me, naming women I have loved is identical to taking their pictures. Their names spoken are identical to the images taken. To me, it doesn’t matter if that name is one from decades and decades back, or if that name is one from the week prior. The divine must never be profaned. To me, naming and creating the image of the divine profanes it. It is taking what is divine and soiling it, chewing up what is real and meaningful to what is rendered mere amusement and sport. I have never named or created an image of any of my life’s loves, besides the one already detailed, and I never will.

(Novel excerpt, 2004—click here for other current works)

You Got What You Deserve (cont’d)

1     Dicks [continued]

…It’s more than just that. I mean what is a dick anyway? Having a big dick is partly attitude, partly blue jeans. That’s where I put more of my energy. The crotch-thing was a lot more reliable than breath-catching, which might really be just a bunch of ballooey. Face it, I myself really barely saw much for dick in high school, so what was I myself to know? Like give-away bikini tops, crotches were everywhere, and the pants a guy wore and the way he swung his legs around, these were the tell-tale signs of who he was and what he’d do or not.

Take a teacher in a nice pair of double-pleated slacks, ironed, creased, and cuffed. Kind of boring, but there is that master and servant thing going on there between the teacher and student; it’s no Night Porter, but, where does the potential for a sex scene drop out? Double-pleats. Any guy, teacher or not, who has to fluff up his lap with an air-bag, it doesn’t matter what he’s got there inside the breadbox. He doesn’t have attitude. He might have the hunger of a bear waking up in springtime, but he’s hidden the beast so far back in a dark endless cave of folded cloth, he’ll never get out of there. Guys with pleated pants, they’re born to dwindle in the background and masturbate. Appetite, yes. Adventure, no.

The flip side is a guy in really tight, straight-cut, black designer jeans. When he sits down, it’s the mumps, those two gobstopper-sized carp eyes floating to the surface. It’s just pure Archimedes. The stuff has to go somewhere. A guy sitting on his desk facing the class with his legs crossed wearing a set of these is making the day for any girl in class out for some pretty gross bird-watching that period. There he is, ass on the desk and, basically, his dick is in every girl’s eye, all squunched up there behind that inky black denim.

Even worse, when it’s so jacked up, like maybe he’s shoved a miniature valentine pillow in his underwear, it’s pretty obvious that he’s wearing bikinis, which means a couple of things: He either wants to be a Calvin Klein undergarment model, or thinks he is. When a teacher thinks he’s that, then he’s either really in the wrong profession, or there’s something borderline debatable hiding behind the stitching of that kind of rive gauche wannabe fashion dick hoisted up on the right side there.

Bunched-up power-dicks show the attitude of the guy that has to be put up with too; so, if that’s the inner-life of the teacher in question, my advice to myself was to skip it. The right look, it’s either in a pair of flat-front khakis or a pair of ordinary blue blue jeans. The crotch area, when the teacher’s sitting, with one leg draped over the knee of the other, doesn’t bulge like he’s wearing the mouth of a horse down there, nor cower like a baby bird in the nest when Mommy’s flown off for five or ten minutes. It’s got the home-made mashed potato look: A good convex scoop chucked between his legs, smooth, with a few lumps. It’s the difference between the real pearl, a little misshapen by nature, and the cultured one that wears its shapely perfection like vanity.

My taste is for the former, where a guy is cumfortable enough with himself just to be who he sits. It’s like make-up for girls — the best make-up being when it looks like there’s none at all, or when there is none at all. Wearing underwear’s probably necessary to guys, though, like a lens cap is to a camera. Mr. Bigdick wasn’t really about size, even though I did think about it a lot; it was about pants mostly.

Available now in paperback and ebook.

You Got What You Deserve

1     Dicks

Finally, I thought, I’m gonna get fucked.

Sometimes it’s really easy. Sometimes it takes like forever.

All sorts of shit gets in the way a lot. They’ve got girlfriends or they’ve got boyfriends or both of them or they’ve got political hang-ups against fucking or they’ve got std’s or they’re on some frickin religious holiday they don’t believe in.

But all around, I’m pretty patient. When I spot a random piece of guy I like, I expect it to put out over time, if that’s what it takes. And I understand the rules, the social-political ones that could really fuck someone over if I did the wrong thing. And that’s why I waited.

This guy, as soon as I saw him, I registered him downstairs in my little blond sandwich shop, thinking: He doesn’t belong here. This guy’s bony face and untamed bush of gray hair belonged somewhere else, but not in school. Even with his khakis and baggy sweater on, he had the wrong look for an English teacher. He had the big cock look. Teachers don’t have that. They don’t because they don’t have big cocks. They have puny cocks, puny cocks with a lot of hair mostly. They want to have big cocks, so they work in places that most girls don’t know the difference. Most teachers wouldn’t survive anywhere else. Anywhere else and the breath of the person you’re talking next to tells you how big his dick is.

Whenever I talk to a guy, I get up just close enough to catch his breath to tell how big his dick is. Or not. Most girls in high school just don’t know about that. And, being high school girls, they hardly know the difference in cocks anyway. So for puny-dicked male high school teachers, the set up is perfect. Christ! Any one of them who brings up in class themes of incestuous sex in Hamlet or an old guy humping a young chick in Chaucer seems to girls like it’s Mick Jagger whipping it out for his own daughter. Eew! Don’t say that! That’s nasty! You mean Nick Carraway is really thinking like that about his own cousin, Mr. Bigdick?  That’s nasty, Mr. Bigdick, that’s nasty! Sure, even though Daisy is the guy’s second cousin once removed and there’s like zero blood between them, girls get totally grossed out by Nick having the hots for Gatsby’s slutty Daisy and the double or treble ambivalence this causes Nick as narrator slash participant; hence the stifling vocabulary with the mid-western twang.

But, truth be told, they love it, girls love it, really, inside their pants. And they love it mostly because of the erroneous fantasy that Gatsby isn’t clean. Girls who go eew!, the same kind who go down on every guy they can but hardly ever swallow the cum, the first to fuck and the last to have abortions, they love The Great Gatsby because it is dirty, because they think it’s nasty, because they’re getting off on their perverted fantasies of Nick wanting to fuck his cousin Daisy. In high school, basically, any girl who’s more than vaguely aware that her pussy is more than just of fissure for urination, what they want is to feel the breath of any puny-dicked teacher who’ll even say the word “sex” to them. And, as a sort of a whore of the English department, not literally, just an after school flirt mostly, what I learned mostly from high school was that being a high school teacher was mostly all about puny-cocked guys trying to impress the daylights out of hardly experienced girls. And how are the girls to find out or not?

The bravest of teachers, the most brazen, who’ll slip a semi-avuncular arm around the pint-sized waist of a boppy girl coming back next year for a flattering college recummendation, he’ll still say to himself and his small dick, “No pair of tits is worth my pension.” How do I know this? I just know. It’s a sense of smell. It’s all from learning to catch a guy’s breath up close. It tells you everything. And they’re all just chicken-shit to show their little high school dicks to girls that hardly even know the difference really, even the whoriest of them. And make it sound like it’s an ethics thing, that they can’t. It’s all bluff. And the teachers all know it. But not this guy, no way. He had a wad in his pants. I caught his breath. I could tell. He was Mr. Bigdick…

Available now in paperback and ebook.

Tumble Weekly Pillow Talk

When women scream I don’t hear them anymore. When men beat me I don’t feel that anymore. When I went down to the Styrofoam packing plant, all the boys teased me there. I didn’t care. I shouted back at them gleefully, “You can all stuff me alive in a carton and fill it with packing peanuts and snuff out my life with Death, and I wouldn’t mind that!” I told them I wouldn’t feel a thing. They went back to smoking cigarettes and I forgot about them and they forgot about me. Some time ago I dropped off the wing of an airplane. I flew through sky, I flew through the heavens, and I didn’t hear the whistling, I didn’t see the sun shine, even the raindrops that touched my clothes and skin as I passed through the clouds, I didn’t feel them either. There might be a place on Earth where a body crashing can feel that, can sense the thud of life, the impact of living.

Smoking An Evening Pipe

My dueling days had long been over. I bore nevertheless the marks of a scratch upon my cheeks, both left and right. These, after all, had lifted me from my class of common peasantry to one of seeming nobility. Even the shoes I wore had lifted me to higher status. They were made, I suppose, by some craftsman in the nether world unheard of and imported to my lakeside home in Switzerland where, for nearly forty years, I have looked upon the smiling lake. At all times, I did conceal that Moses himself had been a Prince and King. And there had been others as well. Some of the young men who visited me became my lovers, some not. I preferred those before whom I could imagine myself saying the words “aquiline” or “athletic.” If they were spotty or even chubby, I gave them some good counsel wrapped in a purple cloth, and bid them on their way. If I had been ever confronted by a Fool, he was a banker. He had claimed my fortunes were close to ruin, that I was approaching shipwreck, that my lassitude, as he dubbed it, had cost me “immensely.” I have worked harder, I told him, than those who built up the entire Wittgenstein fortune, more industriously than the already forgotten Millikens, and so forth, to lose it all in this landlocked Paradise of Sin, I replied. He declined my invitation to play him a game of checkers, and as he left with my dwindling accounts hanging from his two hands, I had him informed, indirectly, that should he choose to visit me at some future point in time, I would have him beheaded at the nearest distance visible before my front gate.

My Light Blue Blanket Folds

A little blue man with a rounded blue belly once told me all his woes. He told me that he never rose higher than fetching coins tossed toward a scattered highway basket, where, skirting traffic, he was mocked by other toll-takers safely protected in their metal and glass booths. He claimed to be a hero picking skilletfuls of quarters, nickels, and dimes from the speeding pavement. He told me how a fever killed his sense of smell and wartime cost his hair. Proud though he was to practice fencing with a gentleman whose occupation as a famed ophthalmologist made him feel quick and tall, he was never a guest in that same man’s college drinking club, just a block from Grand Central. He filled me in on the deaths of guppies in his fish tank, boiled alive by accident by a faulty water heater, as a child. And he promptly told me of broken women whom he aptly diagnosed, turning the pages of psychiatric classifications, from a borrowed DSM-5. I felt bad and let him touch me a little bit, and worse to let him go.

(read more & play @ egbertstarr.com)