I DREAM OF A YOU THAT’S NOT FUCKED UP
Author’s Note #1: The usage of the word “fucked up” in the following poem will be defined as - Drunk to a dysfunctional degree.
Author’s Note #2: The usage of the word “drunk” will be defined as - bolstered by a false sense of one’s own immortality. For example, drunk on one’s power, drunk on one’s victimhood, drunk on whiskey?
Author’s Note #3: The usage of the word “dysfunctional” will be defined as - life “taking” as opposed to life “giving.”
Hence, the definition for “fucked up” will now be defined as: Bolstered by a false sense of one’s own immortality, contributing to behavior that are life taking, not life giving.
I DREAM OF A YOU THAT’S NOT FUCKED UP.
Last night I went in search of you on a rainy summer night…
The sky abrew with unfelt rain as it contemplated its own weather.
Whether to wait and sweat in the hot air of its own indecision?
Or whether to bleed and release?
Last night I went in search of you on a rainy summer night…
I found you there-
-strewn through all of it.
The dismembered shards of our love glistening back at me obscurely, like the freshly wetted pavement of this broken Brooklyn road.
Last night I went in search of you on a rainy summer night…
The humidity suspending me in our noir-like love affair-
where-the-impossibility-of-you-sauntering-through-this-threshold-is-suddenly-made-possible-by-the-rare-and-restless-yearning-of…
a lightning storm.
Now illuminated, I searched those broken Brooklyn backroads.
Sinfully.
Then aimfuly.
Just to catch a breeze of you.
I went to places you might be if you’d ever come this way.
Places I know you’d like to sit.
Places where your heart would ignite and all your Holy shouting would begin.
Places where your gut would grumble with desire
Where your palette would water with an even wilder lust -
in the easy brown eyes of my Latina waitress and the safety of her jolly bosom.
In the enchantment of her large gold hoop earrings as they chime seductively against her neck with the nostalgia of your first true boo.
In the clatter of this bowling alley named “Gutter” whose apropos title now tries to wake me more gently than your rage ever could.
In the warm buzz of a conversation with my beer-bellied Alabama bartender named Joe, who’s words whistle with an incurable homesickness deliciously similar to yours.
That homesickness that would make you fall in love with me like you were finally home and-then-leave-me-even-faster-because-you-knew-home-was-where-your-heart-was-and-your-heart-was-still-not-home.
Last night I went in search of you on a rainy summer night…
Bartender Joe asks me if I want another sip of you.
I shamefully say, yes.
He pours you out.
I drink to feel you.
Last night I went in search of you on this rainy summer night…
And I talked and I drank and I looked and I stared at all these New York pieces.
Hoping to find your broken promises made new
Those easy lies of yours replayed again but just a bit more true.
In the tongues of these imagined tribesmen - your band of soul brothers and sisters, that talk and walk and drank like you
All-of-them-drawn-like-moths-to-the-flame-like you.
And I wondered, if given another chance, I might catch our sacred flutter before God’s flame would lick us clean.
God’s Thunder came in search of me on this rainy summer night…
A sober strike of lightening splintered the suffocated sky:
“This shall be your half, and this will be his.”
As if it were possible to split heaven in two.
I pay what’s due.
I walk home.
I walk alone.
That freshly wetted pavement now parched so quickly.
A whole universe of dive bars where I am left fishing for the impossible…
You, but not fucked up.