| Jan. 2nd, 2009 @ 10:24 pm I Wrote A Poem About New Years Once, Which Proved Prophetic, As Years Have Been Ending Ever Since |
|---|
My Great Lost Childhood
1.
"The world is cute in a doomed sort of way." This is the thought I have before the television set. It's New Year's Eve. And I'm at this party and it's like a cloud raining drunken friendship on me.
So I go to the balcony and climbing the railing I stand on its ledge, balanced and erect like Jesus in the breeze.
The night's black fondle rapes me.
The moon sings like an alien.
I think about the year.
2.
It was a year of injury. It was a year of waiting. But it was also the year of the tequila-shot turning point, and salivary invitations in the living rooms of yore.
It was the year that I fell in and out of love with cigarettes. They burned abusively, breaking my body, as I stood on midnight sidewalks, as I sat on curbs outside of airports. They made me need them like big-eyed orphans with rubble for organs, like dying lovers made of paper and always burning and always kissing good-bye.
This was the year of my burning flesh when I toiled shirtless in fields of crops. The rain, when it came, it felt like a thousand cold apologies. And you could hear it coming like a rolling wet avalanche on the grey horizon.
It was the year I was marooned on a feminine continent. Mine was a clumsy mission of love. I stripped completely naked to commit dishonest sign language. I must admit I fumbled dumbly with foreign cuisine.
And it was the year that I failed once again to unite the columns of my bleeding brethren of the blood bank. We have nothing to lose but our picked-pocket blues.
And it was the year of the tequila-shot turning point ( if I haven't mentioned that already ).
And it was the year that my lover and I kissed like puddles in a parking lot. My lover mixed with water was a flawless institution. We bathed in streetlamps and the static of raindrops. Her face tasted pink. Her edges were wet. And for hours we slid upon slippery tongues and I rode her lips down a waterfall.
This year I was wrong a lot. I slumped sadly on forsaken blueprints. I hurled last-year's love notes into a bonfire in abandoned campgrounds. I'll never need those ideas again.
This was the year a lover escaped me, as I stood shattered on a summer pier. I gave her back her father's hats. Her makeshift boat was upon the water. It was fashioned out of photographs of us in various states of the union and blankets we'd made love upon on purloined phantom evenings. All it took was one brave push with my shoeless foot to send her raft drifting into unknown waters, gradually and forever. I remember the sun like a tarnished puce headlight leaning slowly into the sea.
This was the year that heathens stormed the museum. They dragged beaten and barefoot through the streets the naked posers for the painters. And soon our guns will be in space.
3.
So there I am, remember, on that balcony, these memories crashing like drunken dump trucks of the mind, an archipelago of instants, and I, a crazed Magellan.
But for all its Sturm und Drang, a year is a thing that you leave.
Even for all its death and song, a year is a thing that you leave.
So I'm standing still on the balcony's ledge, erect and rippled by fingers of wind. And downstairs in tomorrow's parlors, everybody's in tails and top hats, clanging together their flutes of champagne. Lady Luck is down there dressed as a bride for an unborn groom. Her legs are spread like an open cash register. Her womanhood is a grassy steppe... steppe... step. Hot light pours out of the windowed facade from the parlors of tomorrow like a 24-hour soup kitchen of hope for the homeless vagrants of the soul.
And upstairs I'm balanced on the balcony's edge, playing chicken with Isaac Newton. Soon we'll all be as new as the year.
My thoughts turn to philosophy, what then is a human being?
A sentimental sentinel of a semi-century?
Then while I live, I'll plum the ages, pull the pin on love's grenade,
kiss my mistress, bloody-fisted,
sally down the promenade!
Then suddenly everywhere, live from New York City, that luminous sphere is falling earthward like a homesick spaceship. And aiming for the softest patch of future, I finally take my leap of faith.
Doom is a cuckoo clock. Luck comes like the sun.
My great lost childhood is yet to come.
Nicholas Moore |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tom_sizemore's journal
