The adrenaline of sex may be the only thing that will sustain me, maintain for me a level of "quality of life" that is still recognizable from this deep pit, this cistern echoing with fundamental fears, smelling of death. And remembering my conquest of other fears, retaining those life lessons, I am eager to confront the underlying monster, the demon that possesses or is my body. I will go into the darkness. I will feel both its cold and its heat. This is like being launched into outer space. I will go to other sunless worlds. I will grope the uncertain surface. With tactile knowledge, I will make maps and by them I will achieve something approximating understanding.
There are specters there.
Outlined against their nakedness, the thin ones always look ghoulishly hung. Their exaggerated phalli hang strangely against the skeletal outlines, their bones like fragile trees (waiting) in November. Mortality and vitality thus stand together, starkly, each exposing the other, removing the mask.
The fat ones, on the other hand, continue, elaborately shrouded in the folds of their gluttony, a whole history of their desperation remembered in the flesh. And somewhere, in the obscenity of abundance, the shy turtle-head of the penis peers with lust and shame, afraid of being seen, hoping to be noticed...
There is no logic in fear. There is efficacy, efficiency even; but as far as rational standing, fear--regardless of the facts and statistics it may recite--speaks with authority about nothing save itself and its possession. Fear is the demon that speaks to the hole in our understanding, connects the dots to the troubles from beyond the bubble have always promised to come. The dispossessed, the refugees, the savages will most certainly ravage us in the coming storm. At least these animals can only wait at the gate, impatiently, eluded to in rumors, imagined in bad dreams. The most grisly monster is the murderous worm that turning in the belly is waiting inside to devour us.
Is he the alien or am I? I feel as though there was, at some point, a green world that basking in the light of a not-so-distant star, became inhabited by my memories, the people of my reveries, the inhabitants of my heart, my soul, the whole of what's left of my being.
This body, broken on the beach of some black sea, this invisible cadaver, this bloodless trunk, this wuthering tree...
I am 47. I am at that age wherein my memories have begun to coalesce. I am making sense of them, but they are scattered. As if I am gathering matchbooks and cocktail napkins, old envelopes, post-its. and photographs that contain both of us but sharing the lens with "good friends" with forgotten names, I am making the collage of my life, my days. The pretty pictures in calendars almost persuade me.
On all these scrips of paper--my broken voice in pieces--there are careless whispers (as they call them) bits of wisdom, scraps of poetry, that say too little and talk too much.
For Example:
...to fuck a 22 year old requires an energetic belief in tomorrow
but the very act (and the attraction)
demonstrates the grim fact; you already cannnot believe
in tomorrow for yourself,
projecting your regret and hopelessness
and the idea of hope itself
into the body of someone half your age...
in tomorrow for yourself,
projecting your regret and hopelessness
and the idea of hope itself
into the body of someone half your age...
