Though then they are sure to be covered by fur and leathered skin, my long muscles will construct your house and I will live just down the road. We can sell our cars and buy old bicycles to ride to each other's houses. During the big storms I will stay at your house. Neither one of us will know who is comforting whom. I'll cut my hair off once every year, but always keep a big beard. I'll play guitar when you're sick and you can smooth the kinks in my hair when I fall asleep.

We'll buy raw, rich coffee once a month from a boy on a bicycle who sells different odds and ends. One time, I buy you a bracelet. Another time, a polka-dotted skirt.

Sometimes, without storms at all, you or I might find the other in each other's bed. When this happens, I pull you close to feel the softness of your body and breathe in deep. Naked and warm, we'll lie prostrate in gratitude to whomever's design our lives belong.

Said the Libertine to the Coquette (by Kyle Seibel)

I made a joke without thinking
anyone would laugh or rather
thinking no one would laugh.

"Said the libertine to the coquette..."
I started theatrically and paused.

You wished I were really a libertine
and I wished you were really my true love.

These are tiny days of a burgeoning life. There are very kind pockets we droop into when our bodies refuse to go anymore. There are warm arms running with blood of milk and soda and applesauce.

And I love them all. The trinkets of these odd little moments I jingle in change purse of my little mind and I believe this is the sound of the scruffy boy humming on his way to the world.

Let them ravage me and take me. Store me with the slaves of my modern convention and slap me back when my smile refuses to flatten. I shall persevere, I shall take the footholds of a ancient ladder and make little steps to a place where I can claim the breathing air for mine alone, a place where I can lay on my back and leather my heart for the oncoming storm.

I wonder if anyone reads these posts...

If we are to trust the poets (I'd like to think we should and do), there is much to be made with a solitary man. The poet, alone, awake while everyone else is asleep. I wonder if the life of an artist is gratifying, whether we sulk in cafes and coffee shops flying the Roethke or Bukowski flag to the merchant vessels of pretty young women for the reasons of romance or sheer boredom. It is interesting to think of the connection we find with someone who has known what we know. Someone I have never met could feel like the oldest friend when we realize the moderater of the strongest of bonds has been William Maxwell or John Fante. To have spoken and chattered away with an old volume, something tucked away for outcasts and fanatics. To think upon those times as not huddled and alone, but as a part of syndicate of lonely apostles, fingering dry pages, our eyes wet with consumption.

So the artists are not our wolves who mauraude the little provinces of an ordinary life. They are the fathers of our encounters, the engineers of the chance happening, the joint upon which swings two limbs of hot-breathed, bright eyed youth. Like all fathers, they should be blamed for the collision which such a union is bound to cause.

So curse you F. Scott Fitzegerald! I know you wrote that passage for art's sake, but damn you for the congeal and break it has made! Don't you sneak off Theodore Roethke. I know you! You are to be blamed of all! You and that brilliant little poem "My Papa's Waltz!"

Literature is an unspoken language among the lonely and when the door cracks upon and through its dusty cell walks anyone, the time spent on the cold prison floor, sharing stale crackers and gruel, is worth the pain when they have to go.

Ride my bike to California? I couldn't. I wonder how Mark is doing.

Do I seek out these hushed corners of life? I find myself inching away from the fracas and soft eying the entire scene. To watch my tiny world with a wonder and a frown. Staring at a girl looking at the magazine rack, talking to her man on the phone. I always want to be on the other end of the call from a girl looking at magazines. I don't suppose it has ever occured to me that many times I was probably that man. I believe that is the magic of being that person, for he does not know I was staring longingly at the girl looking at the magazine rack for to be the man she was talking to on the phone, so he does not know he is the man she is talking to on the phone. For all the times he has felt the three week's growth on his cheek, plucked dry, coarse tones on his talentless guitar and sucked on the insides on his mouth in pure frustrated desire, he does not know his station of the man on the phone with the girl at the magazines, while I look and sing and weep.

I met Pablo Neruda for the first time this morning and I felt like a mariner. Introduced by a leading heart and a kind tongue, I nibble the poem like a child sick with the flu, eating his first crackers in days. Starving I am for the words to be hers, though when I am finished, when I lay back on the couch, my pink belly covered in crumbs I know it will be still long before I am well.

What darkened hallyways do we linger! What face cupped in my hands! What dangling jewelry and what eyes brim with big wet tears as I leave! What do I miss more? Is it the sweet taste of white skin on my dry lips? Is it tiny, tiny lips?

I think above it all it is the sharp intake of breath before our faces do wed. The sudden repulse before the resistance subsides. The low voiced "Kyle." That subtle frown atop those hips. Do I smile for love, for loveless life does reside? Am I the jettison youth on the urn? Am I consistently pleased with being consistently denied?

My admition is the love of her flaws. How God whittled her nose thin for to fit in a book, her vehemence against her creator who did such. Raw red lips when she's been crying. Raw red cheeks all the time. So I cannot boast of my liason, let me not preen on my distance of such a sepulchred beauty, but let me sneak into the shadows behind her ear, let me live in the mist of her scent.

But let me not live without her.

Drinking While Driving (by Raymond Carver)

It's August and I have not
Read a book in six months except something called
The Retreat from Moscow
by Caulaincourt
Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.

I hope I can write something like this someday

Our backyard is a gravel parking lot and here rodents have no fear nor shame. A squirrel we have named Sire is always there. I think he has made a home in one of the nearby trees and our cavalier sanitation keeps him around, hoping for a freezer burnt Pizza Roll.

Ben loves Sire and plays with him every afternoon. Sometimes I go out with him, but yesterday I watched the two interact from my bedroom window. A slight worm of thought came to me as I saw Ben give Sire some food, lure him close and when Sire was finished, Ben stepped back and began firing small rocks. Sire dodged any and all things thrown at him and perried when Ben lunged at him. Ben later told me he likes to keep Sire on his toes, that he doesn't want him to go soft.

Is it possible that from my window, watching Ben and Sire, I was witnessing a microcosm of God's love?

These past weeks have felt tumultuous, truly aboard an unworthy craft in a storm. Was it simply God throwing rocks at me? Keeping me from becoming soft or lazy? The humanitarian would dismiss Ben's hard love. Invite the squirrel into your home and give it milk, warmth, one would say. How many times have I wanted to be ushered into God's house, eat his food, sleep atop his massive rising and falling chest! Indeed to be calm and still in your creator's protection.

Ben's answer is clear and defiant. We pride ourselves for our hardship tempered qualities. The battle scars we carry make for the person we are, or wish to be. We are quick to point out the parts of ourselves which are carved out of wood, the carver often times an unseen force (read God). Keeping Sire lean and edgy promotes a fitness of character and while Ben truly loves that little squirrel, it is in his ultimate love do we find his abuse.

I am not ready for so many rocks, I think. There are some who would encourage the lunging and assaults as God's providence of love, but I would rather them stop. No more rocks, no more attacks. You don't need to make a place for me in the house either, just keep tossing out the apple cores and pizza crusts and I'm sure I'll be fine.

In the light of day, the map unfolds and the creases are smoothed by God's heavy dark hand. I walk the wrinkles and smudges to my job, to work. All morning I voyeur, dream and sometimes work. More coffee! More coffee!

A few weeks ago I woke up very early. I walked downstairs and sat on my couch. I wrapped myself in a smelly blanket and sat on my back porch and ate an apple. It was then I realized God is an early riser and must go to bed early. The evidence of majesty and heaven was so clear. God had been up for hours before I was that morning, setting up the entire layout of my world, like a benevolent craftsman tinkering with a train set. The tri-colored sky (black then pink then blue) was so striking I was lulled into a lazy calm. The sun rose and quickly burned off this mist, this feeling, but all through the day I could not help but think that morning while the entire world lay untouched and covered, I was part of the landscape God had created. I was licked by the slick brush of the morning.

Moments like these calm me and make me feel not alone, but blended with the fabric of a divine plan. Though I am isolated now, have cut ties from a woman who keeps such elegance and grace, I feel I have not lost her. She lives in the same town and when I have mornings and moments like that, it is as if we are bedfellows.

I think about her almost constantly. I want her to be near me, I want to gaze at her. So through the chilly cool of a gray morning, I'll tug my jacket around me that much tighter, pump my bicycle that much harder and make believe the stinging tears are from the wind whipping my eyes.