joe.

So now what? 

You know, a bad movie can do some good things.  Especially, when one is as emotionally fragile as I, one may perceive profound movement of things ancient and unmoved, even in a bad movie.  Perhaps I am not as fragile as I am labile; emotions shunned create a resevoir that presses evermore for release.  It is like a thing called Vedic sex, a kind of intercourse consisting of fortuitous flirtation with orgasm, to the very peaks of potency’s release—but without going over.  Ghandi did it.  Some guy, the one who writes Tales of a Slut, he did it.  And now maybe I do it, sitting here, with my fingers delicately floating upon the surface of these keys, the little eager upturned faces of each lexical awaiting my intention.  No matter how I touch them—a tap, a stroke, a punch—it is always a depression. 

So now what? 

This vicious little presence in which we live, it has no end.  No kiss the girl, save the world, tidy little rescue from upon the flaming lips of death sort of ending, like in Armageddon, the movie.  It just goes on. 

It is bitter cold outside.  The sidewalks are like emergences from between great snowbanks of a universal subterranian serpent all lumpy with tumors and coated with glass.  It is nothing so sinister.  It is the unshoveled snow left by uncaring landlords, melted and refrozen a dozen times this week, and preserving in the beauty of crystalized water the dirt and the injuries of a thousand passing boots.  Cars whine helpless in the middle of clear dry streets, having been stopped with their wheels upon an emergent patch of this serpent’s back, the hard, undulating, impermeable ice. 

Yet nothing could be so impermanent.  This hard ice will immobilize a fifty thousand dollar SUV and break the hips of unwary pedestrians.  But it will be cloud soon enough, watching us from above as it floats by in the bright spring sky, and crying down upon us in its most tender incarnation.  With great crokodile tears, it will again beg forgivness from the earth, pleading as with a lover to be absorbed and consumed by its beloved, one more time.  The downpour asks to be accepted, but it will come and have its way no matter what. 

And so is life; now ice, now warmth.  Impenetrable hardness and seperation becomes indissoluable union.  The passion of a moment becomes the seperation of a lifetime.  I do not contrast the two things, I equate them.  A moments passion can compensate a lifetime of seperation, it is that valuable.  I know such an equation seems trite and shabby, and with our moralistic minds we grotesquely distort what value things may have.  At some other moment or at some other place outside of time we may know something quite different from what we know now—I have had glimpses of perception incongruent with the standard view which makes me think this way. 

I discard people.  I do things with my body not considered safe nor moral.  I am so reckless with opportunities for love that an affair is a rare and special thing if it even gets under way with me.  And always my affairs, the few that I’ve had, wreck themselves upon siren-bearing rocks where I have chosen to go—perhaps irresponsibly.  I have done it so much that I have formed an uncertain opinion that I fear intimacy.  But often I am queasy about how easy that explanation is, that I am afraid of intimacy; I don’t really believe it.  What if disaster on such shores were the soundest choice of all?  What if responding to the call to venture out of the safe channels was more noble than obedience?  How would I have ever known certain agonies?  And who am I to say they were not ecstasy?  When upon the mountain’s top, the distance between the sides—between light and shade, right and wrong, pain and pleasure and agony and ecstasy and life and death—the distance is very short indeed.  Upon the mountaintop. 

And I do not just discard people out of contempt.  I don’t know why I do it, but I am certain it is not contempt.  I think it may be love.  Yes indeed.  I think, once long ago, I fell in love with my own disassociation from this world.  My breath was taken by the view it gave; my soul was liberated.  I could see from a place unlike the place I held within the world.  The place upon this earth where I began, the spot on this planet where I gained knowledge, experience, language; it was nothing compared with that place, that startling vantage point to which that first lover launched me.  That new perspective stirred in me a vague and shadowed memory of another place I had been, a place beyond this world, outside of time, veiled by tears.  Lonliness is a small price to pay for the things that lover did to me.  He was my uncle, and I was three. 

How can I not say he was my lover?  It has nothing to do with the sexual organs involved.  It has to do with liberation.  A lover is one who launches us into places where we would not have gone.  One cannot take such a journey in ease and comfort, so a lover is also one who causes pain.  It has ever so proven in subsequent experience.  I daresay the poet would agree.  In this sense the lover is not the boy who gets me off, although he could be such a lover if he did more than make me come.  In the sense I mean it, the lover is the one who changes us profoundly, permanently.  We needn’t like the lover, nor must the lover like us.  Indeed, most of the people in our lives who affect us intimately are people we would prefer didn’t touch us at all.  But they do.  The black man touches the bigot; the privileged annoy the poor (and vice versa); the closeted boy is terror-struck by the flamboyant drag queens parading on the news.  We all touch each other, in very intimate ways. 

I can have you all as lovers—I don’t need good looks, youth, a big dick, or money.  I need only courage. 

What if agony is just agony?  Pain, just pain?  What if good and bad are real things, not just vague assumptions?  Does that make such experiences absolutely avoidable, doomed to never be visited by the light of a conscious soul?  Why should I leave orphaned these experiences that all others shun, for no good reason that I can see?  Is the joy of life not the joy of ALL of it, is it only the joy of a few subjectively preferred parts?  What if these opportunities with these things are the only opportunities we will have?  What if death really is The End?  Maybe it’s because I have already been run through, and have already gained an uncommon perspective on life that makes me willing to experience, or rather, unwilling to forfeit these so called ‘bad’ experiences in life.  Maybe I just want it all. 

Give it to me.  Baby.