i walk through soul-less train station parking lots to get to work. i walk past townhomes and apartments. there is an ice razor prairie wind on my face and hardened goose shit on the sidewalk. i wear the beautiful scarf that mary russell knitted for me for christmas. i look up on the neon suburban horizon and see long strip malls looming in the east and chain restaurants and lots of exhaust fumes. this is my new home. route 59 is always backed up but there is always the comfort of the red target sign. i want to lose myself in the aisles of linens and things. i want to finger the 400 thread count bedsheets. the silk throw pillows. the terry cloth robes. the flannel pillow covers. i want to eat sacks of white castle hamburgers. boxes of fried onion rings. chocolate malts. the only thing that makes sense to me is surrealism. andre breton poetry coming out of automobile exhaust pipes. i've gone off the depacote and i'm stranded on maria mckee's "panic beach." i'm linda ronstadt's "prisoner in disguise." i'm the guitar riff at the end of the carpenters' "goodbye to love."
but then,
there's him. my anthony. my tony. my love. and it's all passionate embraces and tender tongue kisses. my italian saint. my hairy monster. my shadow. my beast. my dreaming dream. and it's his sweet face pressed so close to mine as we fall asleep together. his hot breath that i inhale so i can dream. it's his deep voice braided into my hair. it's his scent on the velvet duvet. it's his body and the thrust and the taste of it and the slow pull out and the moan. it's his boyish whiskered face in my hands. it's the rush i get when i've memorized that face and can imagine again his beautiful eyelashes, his tongue, the indentation of his nose, his sweet ears, his eyes. it's wednesday night at his mom's with steaks and guiding light episodes and it's family for me. long lost. a connection regained. a self lost and restored somehow.
and then,
here is naperville as a strange, warped acid trip, a daliesque landscape and i walk in the winter light without knowing what time it is. i know it's january 2003 but this is a month that isn't on any calendar. this is a mirror where i can't see myself or remember anywhere i've been. sometimes manoze rescues me and we talk about life and everything that tries to resemble it. sometimes we listen to music in his jeep and forget where we're driving and we just drive down the long long highway . .best friends we say . .and we are. and then, then, i think i know myself .. and what i could do . .how i could live in the world . .
i try to hold on but it's all mercurial . .slippery . .hold on . .
i try to reconstruct some vague past from photographs . .did i really walk through paris last august, pining for anthony, saying his name before falling asleep, kissing his digital photo on my palm pilot before dreams . .needing myself to write poetry (something gerard . .remember dervish . .remember something!) . .searching for someone in the streets of the marais . .some place . .some new state of being. .trying to force my evolution. .how am i supposed to live? did i really swoon over some bluecollar boy at madame tata's promenade--full moon and everything? and fall into a crush with some nameless writer at the tuileries--too shy even at this age to approach him (learn french gerard, i told myself, and grow old in france!) did i really waltz through zig-zag streets with abra this summer, tanned and blonde and svelte and desired . .did those photos lie . .am i retelling them wrong . . was i there really?
did i really lose five hundred dollars at the slot machines in las vegas last october? did anthony and i really stay at the flamingo hotel and make love with a view of neon and glass? did we walk down the strip together? did we see rita rudner and rick springfield? did we actually cry for three hours in our hotel room and fall in love all over again (me drunk from the paris hotel)? this film called my life has gone wild. it runs ahead of me. i try to catch up .. i'm the protagonist in this cinema verite . .i'm really here right? or i was . .and i've fallen into some bit part, some minor role . .a walk on? . .what are my lines? where is the plot twisting . .did i somehow miss the major climax . .is there more?
did i really sell the loft in December and leave my beloved printer's row in chicago? have I gone on to another campus . .another phase .is it true i haven't written poetry for seven months? did i really have a mid-life crisis? did i really bend the ear of every friend i know (thank you Xavier, thank you Mary, thank you Dorothy, thank you Claire!) . .how long was i crying, begging them to help me to hold on to any semblance of sanity? did i fall so deeply in love? so deep that as i resurface . .i gasp for air . .dazed, worried . .wondering . .where do i find myself? am i here? here? i pinch myself . .am i awake . .alive . .
here?
i live in naperville now . .i work at the dupage campus . .i am starting to imagine possibilities again . .i can fall asleep better now . .but then there's panic . .jitters. . .black doubt . .. there is so much to catch up to here . .i lost myself last summer. . . . .i made love one night and on june 8th 2002 i fell in love . .i swam in lake michigan and became somebody else. . .i lied about my age and got caught . .that was my secret wish to grow up . .that was my desire for acceptance . .to stop pretending and be the man i am right now . .not the ingenue . .me . .with all my experience in tact . . . .thank you universe . .thank you wishing heart . i have found solace in a boy's arms . .but i don't want to lose the best of me . .all that jazzical resonance . .does he always see me . .i hope . i want . . . can i become a man and discover my true path . .accept my abandonment . . .realize it . .bless it . . .now i've moved to a house in the suburbs . there are empty rooms and i get this eerie feeling that there should be live, human voices calling me from within them . .not television voices like lucy or musical voices like madonna . .real ones . .voices knowing me, compassionate ones . .voices whispering and loving me . .but it's all echo for now . .and empty and finally it's my own voice withered there. .squelched and longing .inside and stuck and stillborn and asking me .where am i now .. where am i now .. where am i now?
