ulRich

I go out on halloween as YOU, as you might go out as someone else going out going and being Carrie.  There are these juvenile pleasures that chuckle at the nightmare.  Reviving her.  Everything we are and everything we pretend to be.  We are these complications. 

You haunt me in your way, your memories like sighs rising just for the confessional.  There is something in you.  You extort power from the illusions that transfix the crowds with fear; and after they have gone home, you remain and I can feel you near.  All these golden leaves.  If only they stole music from the wind like they pilfer glitter from the lamps. 

There was this time.  There was a night like this one when the air was cooler than it had pretended to be   from inside.  We had been visiting a mutual friend who's gas heater was working hard, the same noises it had  made for twenty some years.  Ghosts in the blue organza flame.

Did I tell you?  When we were sharing stories about our valor, about the bravado that it took and takes to make performance art out of one's sexuality... there is wonder and amazement when phallus manages to write poetry in the splatter scrawl of our graffiti: cum on bricks, cum on daisies, cum on the dumb standing stones of the ancients.

Once there was this time, I begin.  A cool night in the fog, and I was with a boy that looked like you would have looked if you were our age at the time.  If I had known you then--a friend, a collaborator, ,a lover--I might remember you differently.  I might manage some tears on this uncounted anniversary of your birth.