poems of love and ardor...

 

                 He leaves. The computer sits portly-chinned and blank screen and comatose in his parents bedroom. He will excuse himself and he will write. Everything that is inside of him he will splatter across the screen, a pocketful of pixie-dust glittered into poetic passages-his first book. Spanking the sentiments out of each sentence. Cudgeling his thoughts, remembering what it is that he had and yet never possessed. He is writing, transcribing every emotion out of his fingertips. Fueling, he can feel the plane in O’Hare take off once again inside the thrusters of his fingertips. He can feel his ass buckled into his seat, like his first sexual encounter years later, he will swallow several times, he is ascending, he his coming to the moment where physical mass is set adrift, levitating and leaving. He is flying. He is disciplining the tattered dog-eared sheaths of ink-splotches. He is trying to find out who he is as an individual. And he is soaring, tipping into the keyboard to verify his provisions. He writes, he leaves, goes out back, fires up a camel, retreats back inside. Leaves only to comes again, seeing his reflection directly in front of him, as he looks into the aqua-tint off-teal blue of the screen, making out a skidding tear sloping off of his chin, knowing, for the first time in a very long time, knowing, as he types of SOJOURN TO CHICAGO and POEMS OF LOVE AND ARDOR FOR MEGAN KRISTINE  knowing, for the first time, where it is that he is supposed to go and what it is that he is supposed to do.

                                                                         ***

I tell her again that she is beautiful. She looks back at me and gives me and almost listless shrug.

 

 

                                                                        ****

 

“But I can go there in my imagination though,” Megan tells me, over the phone, before telling me that she wants to go there right now.

 

 

                                                                        ***

 

Megan is making an almost sapient point in informing me that all I purportedly did last summer was just to cheat on my girlfriend. I tell her that I just kissed a few other girls. I told her that I never have sex with any of them. I tell her that its not like she has ever cheated on anyone before. Her face snaps in the fashion of some kind of animated botanical flytrap as she tells me not to digress and changes

the subject.

 

She tells me again that she is talking about me.

 

Megan makes a point of telling me that I was calling her and being all romantic.

 

She rhetorically asks me again why I do shit like that.

She asks me why I hurt people.

 She then tells me that I do it intentionally.

 

I look out the side window and can see streaks of autumnal light break into particles and slants of eternity against the side mirror that reads OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

There are several scratches on he vinyl and then Judy Collins begins to carol out the opening railroad anthem to Tom Paxtons LAST THING ON MY MIND. The sun is still bleeding through the window in sheets of gold, splattering into the carpet like some sort of drape and all I can do is try not to be sullen, Try not to cry.

 

                                                                   ***

I give Kitty Pekowski  a hug. She does not return.

For reasons I forget about after she leaves I neglect to give the cubed K necklace back to her.

Every Friday is golden. Sometimes there is a tempest during the week.

 

                                                                          ***

“I told my mom about you. I asked my mom how old she was when she realized that she as in love.”

 

                                                                             ***

 

 

 

The phone reverberates in the house. It is almost always Patrick and he is almost always at Lums wondering where I am at. When he arrive an ashtray is already flooded with gray astericks He asks me what I am doing this Saturday night. I tell him I am working but that I am off at six.

 “Dude, good because we are going.”

 

I ask him where. He says Wyld Side Cabaret, I ask him what that is. He says it is a strip-club out in the country.

 

“Only it’s a Bee-why-owe-Bea strip club and you can get in if your 18 because they don’t serve beer.”

 

Where is it at?”  I inquire, trying to get a more specific location.

 

“Kenny Illinois?”

 

Where is Kenney Illinois?”

 

Patrick shrugs, tells me that it’s a little red-neck hickville farmtown outside of Bloomington.

"Dude, they will let you in, don't tell me you are not going.  Your are going."

Before I hang up the phone I tell him yes, well maybe, well let's wait and lets see.

                                                                           ***

 

Every time I take off running I can feel the residue from last summer skirt down my flesh in rosary beads of sweat. I can feel the experiences from the golden summer perspire and drip and linger, flushing themselves out of the entirety of my anatomy. The streets have an almost copper flare to them as I continue to thrust my elbows in hard right angles and run, pushing myself down the cement arteries, thinking about Walt Whitman, thinking about Infinite jest and the poems I am going to write for my creative writing class—the professor I am sure will discover me, running, my limbs akimbo, the memory of tripping inside the saltine wedding batter of Misty’s thighs on Bloomsday, the sound of Interstate humming what perceived to be a canticle in the background, fireworks blossoming over head like homecoming boutonnieres moments after our first kiss. As I perform a customary loop in Bradley park, pushing my way through the William James architecture of the uplands, thinking about Tractaus logicus philosophicus, thinking about how Riley’s tongue entered my mouth those balmy August nights like a lazy river barge and how I didn’t mind because she had the name of the woman I had been chasing for all my life, the heels of my adidas trotting through the ghetto, wending my way to Nebraska avenue, heading in the direction of what is almost directly dead east, pedaling my limbs in a locomotion of speed, my knees clop and cantering and pulling away from my thoughts, trying not to picture the frozen lips of Princess Di, thinking about William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon and how I wish I could engender the sprinkling narrative of a book that blasts off with that sort of velocity, running, marshaling my limbs, the galactic bulb of the sun bleating overhead as I pull a hard left off of Nebraska skidding on to Proctor, pushing myself the 800 flat meters until I reach the entrance to Glen Oak park, the pavilion where the genesis of my Freshman year in high school I thought about Ambra wearing the lavender dress she wore in music man, thinking about Dawn Kimble and the Cure and Wishing oh-so seemingly impossible things, stopping in the battlement, near the cannons, stretching my limbs as baubles of sweat fall off my flesh like drool, wondering how Megan is adjusting to her first semester in Decorah Iowa, remembering how the sun felt on the back of our necks last autumn in Appleton as I quoted Rumi to Megan in the park and she continued to iterate that we were both two very different people indeed.