A few weeks ago I concluded I was no longer good. I realized the goodness inside me I treated as a petulent child, chasing it away with reproach and remonstrations. The days wore on as I thought on it and soon understood, being good (or losing it, in my case) mattered like some laundry gone missing. The loss of it is almost amusing, drastically bemoaning it to your friends or using the clever banality as grounds for calling an old friend. Recounting your favorite t-shirt that somehow you can't find. Don't you remember, you'd ask. You would press your nose in my chest, in that shirt and breathe in. Isn't it funny to think, you'd chuckle. Isn't it funny to think it was that shirt I've now lost? And she would laugh too, I bet. Timing her giggle to mimick yours, in no greater intensity, with no greater urgency. There would be the swelling sadness beneath the words, as anyone might expect. And you would say something about the time you kissed her on the stoop, speaking lightly and silly. What would happen then, my friend? Would your former love's voice grow deep and low, fingering the memory herself? Would let another giggle go? Would her man come in then and ask her who she is talking to?

Oh dear, and she'd hang up. Still the smile on your face, you'd sit by the window for awhile afterwards, and yes, you would brood.

The goodness I've lost is the direction and earnestness I never had. I've always felt strange in the skin given to me and now, naked, I feel no more comfortable. I suppose it is the transition in age, I suppose it is the booze or the girls or the poetry or the nights spent writing about booze, girls and poetry, but this past week, watching from a view point sleeping in the sunset, I saw my father and I walk in a kind of kinship I have never felt. Standing in my kitchen, I wanted to put my arm around him, love him and feel proud to be his son, to tell him. But I did none of these things. I scuffed a mark in the linoleum and looked up to smile at a person who is the best man I know.

But I'm still not good and I don't know if I ever was, yet I want to get back. I want to be the son to my father he deserves, not this creeping figure snatching chickens from roosts and returning them ruffled and faded. I'll get back. I'll return to the girl sleeping softly in a bed in the very early morning. I'll take off my shoes and slip in beside her, all scruff and ruddy skinned. It will feel like a night instead of years since I've been there and jostling her slightly, she will wake enough to smile at me, the lines from her sheets still fresh in her face.

I once ended a story with the line, "Life is queer in all the ways we wish it to be." I didn't believe it, but wanted to. I wanted to feel swept up and light with the odd fabric of my life. I wanted to marvel at myself as an oddity, the players in my troupe a menagerie and the setting absurd. Yet, to still make an audience laugh! To spin these countless dancers and kiss them on the mouth with approval of roaring hands! That is how I pictured this all turning out. Myself, cheeks flushed from jumping, the cooling sweat chilling me under my tuxedo and a brazen smile to tell the world my heart.

I feel more squat than fluid and I feel as if I have done more harm than good. One canot wrap up life with saying it has been queer like we wished it to. We all want the procession of normalcy and goodness. We want nice and not kind. We want cuteness but not the devilish and we'd prefer the sleepiness to drunkeness.

So to everyone with faces dimpled with persperation, those kinky little martyrs who end the show in mid-dip of a slim waisted burlesque dancer, eyes fiery and hopping, I wish you well. Your summers will be fruitful and when you fall down, it will give you repose. The rest of us (I believe it is only I left, unfortunately) will make lists, eat the fruit in season, lose our jobs, look for apartments, call you drunk, and wish to be somewhere else.

Somewhere else, faintly east. Somewhere orange and where God has been long finished with. To be there, naked in heat, chest heaving. Exhausted with the thought of going back. Yes.

Springtime (for Everyone)

If time is intent to take our guts,
then let it take its time.
I'm aroused now.
How 'bout you, kid?

I don't like being ridiculed for liking R&B. I want to be praised and goaded to give names, records, mixes. I want to whisper in those dirty ears, "I've been doing this a lot longer than you." I want to elegize the classicism of the music I listen to and denounce the piety of the obscure tripe. I want to chalk an equation, develop a theorem to prove integrity's distance from tunelessness.

So the passion has lit inside myself in a tiny room where I only can give brief insights to the most droll of exchanges. I battle with myself inwardly, wishing the acceptance, but being aware of the solicitation it would mean. I tire of the jump rope conversation, my ignorance of the rhymes they sing, my inability to break into the game.

Relaxing, I see the jazz of the moment. The parts not being played, the determinable words not being said. And how lovely is she. And how awful I feel. The quality of a night a musician alone can recognize, a wunderkind is able to play and virtuoso (in the purest sense of the station) can create. Sometimes it feels as if I am none of these, but merely a critic. A mealy, bookish scavenger feeding on scraps of affection by the things I exalt, their glow giving me an outline.

It is scary to be aware of the goodness a person can possess when embracing them. It is almost as if the world recognizes an effort of good will and the payment is just simple enough to floor you. A flooding glance of sheepish come-hither. Lips pouting and lonely. God as an usher.

Perhaps this is your seat, sir. Perhaps.

The change of season encourages the ego to bloat. While Fante would remark on the brave nature spring provides, how it gives young men the license to feel one thing one moment, another the next (I feel as if Raymond Carver and John Fante would have been wonderful friends), I can't help but slightly tug for a sense of rationality.

Yes, I mock-up Arturo Bandini with his bedroom excercises and feel the swell of bicep beneath a dirty white t-shirt as I strut about town. And yes, I see sometimes the looks of girls and women when I feel as if I'm doing something charming or reckless. But I do not accept them. I do not return them. Stranger still, it does not feel like isolation or a self-execution. It feels not a strain to do one thing or the other. I am not sure if I have rid myself of conviction or whether I just don't care.

Stranger still, I can't stop thinking about that snake Quinn killed.

Sometimes I feel as if my life is just one reflection of a mirror which is held up to another mirror and then inside all the reflections do I sit on the edge of my bed shirtless and dirty. A mere copy and lineage of an endless boy shirtless and dirty at the edge of a bed. Get my hair cut, clean my room, shave and get a new suit. Look at the mirror. It is not as if I have become someone different, but predictable. I'll accept my inheritence of generations before me to smile when I feel like crying and get sick when I feel pain. But the laughing is always genuine, kid. Maybe you can see the brokeness around the cracks of skin and crumpled eyes, but when I laugh it is always real. It always for you.

So if it matters or not, I think I'll stay like this. Charge during the weekdays, feel thrown around and lonely on Saturday nights. So maybe put on a skirt for me, even if I don't see you. Maybe laugh thinking I would have said something funny if I'd have been there. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I'll be held and warm someday. Somebody will look after me, I'm sure.

The longer I lay in bed, the crazier I seem to get. Then, I get a crazy idea.

I imagine myself the visconte in early light. I see myself and the tiny package in concrete wet with petals. You, somehow, there, outside. Me, dirty and sad. The both of us gold.

Tipping my toes, I gleefully make the little crazy idea. I sneak on over in the early light. The morning is gray and heavy cool, but that part never really mattered anyway. It just needs to be me and you and the petals strewn.

The floor outside your house is clear, the rain and thunder could not bring those little things down. Damnit! How bad I wanted to be John! How bad I wanted you to call me 'dear.' No mind at all, no mind at all (though it seems a bit pathetic now). Stuck inbetween your wipers a gift and a small bit of verse.

Still those petals seem to be stuck and I'm tempted to give a shake, but I can't make something happen that wouldn't happen anyway. Anyway.

I had a dream that God was going to send me to hell and I had a certain amount of time to find someone who was willing to claim me for thier own for to stay alive on earth.

Very disturbing.

Where do I go when I feel at once so ready to be launched and listless? I could feel the gritty, sour feeling in my mouth and somehow I could seperate all the awful things I had done, as if they had claimed different spots inside me and they were aggravated and mourning the purity of a landscape untouched.

When I try to boil down simple truths, I can never find God. Only small imprints of morality waning. I refuse to relinquish the thought of it. I feel like I have been searching for God, but in actuality I have been trying to replace God, to be God or a god. This is a fruitless search because believing what I've come to know to be true is slipping and as I find myself in a different epoch of life each passing hour, puts me in a state of mind of complete depravity.

So as my soul seeks, my body feels as if it is free of all constraints. In moral limbo do I pursue all the evil things in life.

I rode my bike all last night. Went to late movie and left the theatre and felt like I was waking up, way too much energy. Got on my bike, rode all night. The birds started chirping around four in the morning and the sun came up around six. I fell asleep for a little bit on a picnic table at Bethel by the lake. What a night.

It is hard to describe nights like last. Sometimes, I feel the grand, over-arching power of the huge movements are the only ones worth putting down. This grin will last for days (regrettably, the smell of smoke will as well) and it will be hard to remember something as genuine and wonderful as last night.

But somewhere larger inside my body makes home a different feeling. It is so rare an occasion in this town to be awake while everyone is asleep, but 4:00am on Friday may be that theatre. The chirping birds. My dirty hair. Tiny coke-bottle glasses. The shadow of the building, the brightning sky and a cool, pink face. I couldn't possibly think about leaving.

When I talked, I began to cry two little bullet tears. They were not wiped away, not brushed or gauchely smeared, but flicked carefully away into the grass. Your foot on mine. I honestly have never felt such intimacy.