It was the last time I saw you baby. The last time I held you. It was spring. There were park benches and poetry and the pastel moisture of the earth opening up the way our bodies open up; the thick deeply rooted bulb of our hearts planted in the soil of a shared yearning of bliss. It was pulchritude. It was joy. They had initially forecasted rain for the weekend love and a spiritual warm front snatched from the pearly coastlines of the next world itself blanketed us with nothing short of a teeming atmosphere flooding every pore with golden eternal moments and a feeling of pure oneness ( not to mention the optical heat index--at least from my visual periphery--was off the charts).....
But it was the last time I held you baby. At the bus stop at O'Hare amidst the gutsy roar of overhead winged silhouettes, the gruff smog of bus terminals; gridlock clatter and sweat of international travel. We had spent one complete day of our respective existence together and in fifteen minutes my bus was to digest both my heart and my body, swallowing me back to the place where I had come from. Chartering me back to another late-night shift. Nother day. Nother dollar. Another life much too far away from the creature who inspires me.
Another life much too far away from the woman who is my muse.
***
The night before last we met I didn't sleep. What was once spiritual mwah's hickied into the comment pool on blogger had transformed into continent-length shaped missives penned from the heart via g-mail, had transformed into a rush of winks and plthssss in the ajar window frame reserved for the IM screen had then transformed into the lushest spiritual petal of your voice echoing through the phone on a nightly basis. The night before last we met, sugah, it was your voice that served as the pulsating metronome of my heart. That voice that filled me with such joy--a crystallized angelic shaft of the most pure light brushing against the side of my face. Two weeks earlier our voices had slowly begun to wade into the pond of each other's vocalized palette like a french kiss It was a Saturday night when I blew off my friend's Brook's birthday party and went home early and you called me. Icy flecks of a portending spring rain pecked against the side of the house I no longer live in. I nursed a few cans of Boddingtons, put on the melodious symphonic exclamations of soprano Cecelia Bartoli swaying to the voice of my beloved muse, thinking to myself. "What a blessing. It doesn't get much better than this."
The night before last we met I couldn't sleep. I heard a voice in my head that ordered me to look for the William Sears tape. I ignore the voice. Tell it to fuck off. Crunching my head into the feathery crown of the pillow. Still the voice resonated, very deeply, with authority and degree.
"Look for the William Sears tape."
About 45 minutes later I wearily rise and sift through three old boxes of sentimental letters and literati nostalgia. Nothing. I pillage the papery dregs of my past for a half-hour in an honest effort to locate the tape. Still nothing. I tell the voice, "Look. I'm tired. My bus leaves in five hours. Let me get some rest." The voice still commands me to look. I'm exhausted. I'm in the process of discreetly moving out and Mike is still milking me for all I'm worth. I've been working on a screen play and only averaging four hours of sleep a night. I want to rake in a few hours of slumber so I can be alive and vibrant and witty for my muse. Still the voice requests that I continue looking. Continuing pillaging. Continue mining my past for a wayward tape. I rake my fingers through expired love letters and callow poems and idle memorabilia--ashy souvenirs from a life ardently lived and extinguished like the cigars I smoke.
I finally go to bed without locating the tape. Forty-five minutes later I wake up. My entire body is caked with sweat and I feel the voice drilling in my bones, ordering me to locate the tape. I rise in my underwear, pick up the box I was previously mining, toss it forcefully against the wall. The papery confetti of my past rains down over my shoulder like autumnal leaves at a Wicca ceremony. Lying at my feet, next to old love letters and crumpled phone digits from my past I found the William Sears tape.
Two weeks later, after a verbal altercation with Mike, I trash all three containers I so wildly sifted through that night. I jettisoned gifts, old letters boasting eternal promises. I thought away jewelry, necklaces, sentimental forget-me-nots from a past I no longer wish to return to. But somehow the tape was salvaged. Had I not given it to you, surely it would not have survived.
***
It has been the summer of extreme poverty and extreme mysticism. when I move into my new apartment, I realize only too late that my next door neighbor has my same exact name with only a slight difference in the last syllable. " David Von Behren" " David Van Baron." My best friend Nick the writer keeps stopping by and planting jokes and naughty notes on the wrong door thinking that it is mine.
A woman I have never seen before requests my help on a project she is working on. She calls me up at the library and asks if I can proof read her thesis. I'm exhausted and am poking the creative flames of my own psyche (trying to catch the onslaught of love poems raining down through the tips of my fingers like pebbles) but I agree. The lady who needs my help looks like Tom Petty and is an elementary school teacher. After two days of going over her academic offerings I inquire where she works and then nearly fall down. It turns how she had just applied for a job at Hollis Grade school, the school where my father taught third graders for the last twenty-five years of his life. The school that has a shrine planed in front dedicated to my father. It turns out, ironically, she is applying for the job in the SAME CLASSROOM, the same grade, that my dad cultivated young minds in during my entire life.
Dangle-dangle-dangle
I too was in the twin cities once and was in love and was completely existentially all alone suffocating in the MN dust, every molecule of my body enamored in the lost absence of the creature I would later dub "swissy-Missy" via blogger. I run into swissy in early June and after shared formalities find out that she has just moved into the house where I grew up.The house that fed and nourished me for 21 years. The house where my parents would pray before every meal and read the devotional outtakes to us after dishes. Her bedroom is the second story room I wrote my first poem in. Less than ten feet away is my parents room--the oaky parental husk. The womb where I was conceived.
How the fuck does this shit happen?
***
The last time I held you love we planted ourselves in the sun on the cement isle that separated incoming and outbound traffic and you were wearing the pearly-white coat you said you hadn't worn in years. The coat your father knuckled-scrubbed a stain out of. "No one gets a stain out like my dad. I have the best daddy in the whole world." I kissed your neck and held you close and caressed my lips on your own prayer bullet like a six month old and a pacifier. There was tint surrounding us on all sides and I could see three of you. Three of us. Your reflection in the hotel windows. Your reflection in the tinty windows abutting the bus terminal. The sight of you in front of me. The shared experience of us. Our plural soul. Baby you were a ravishing angel in that porcelain white coat. And as my vision skirted around, trying to optically inhale the moment for all of eternity, trying to take in all three sights of you, three disparate dimensions coalescing all at once in my arms, that is indeed what I thought. How the fuck has this blessed Polly-winged angel landed in my arms?
An angel. Or maybe, in that ravishing white coat....purely a feather.
*****
Dangle-dangle-dangle-dangle-dangle
MWAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!