Daydream
She was my wife in another life. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Regardless, I can see us on green rolling plains the farmer and the horse lover. There are no children, but everything is bursting with life. Clouds roll across the skies with intermittent breaks of sunshine. The stones, the flowers, and the animals are all just a little damp as the Earth in this place is juicy and bursting with life’s sustaining waters. The nights and mornings are cool but give way to warmer days. This is it: the beginning and the end. The world has only these dimensions: green, mist, and lovers. Why must I castrate myself to achieve emotional impotence? I cannot pretend or be a part-time anything. Am I a modern warrior in the business trenches, or am I a passionate lover and writer of verse? It must be one or the other. I know what I’d rather be, but I won’t let me. I’m afraid to fill that void. That VOID! (I tell myself that no one feels the same, nobody would be interested in the stuff I write.) Fuck it all! I never would, never could. I don’t believe it when someone claims indifference. If you have no feeling you are dead. But not dead as a rock is dead; a rock is the history of this earth and as such is alive. No. A dead person, when still breathing, is a pathetic thing. How sad it is to those alive to see someone without hope, missing all the sensations like sand between the toes and cinnamon beneath the nose. How strange it is that we the living should be envious! You fucking lifeless bastards! You only exist to magnify our negative emotions. We don’t even see you when we are passionately in love. (On a sunny day I forget about the Henry Millers of this world.) So here I am at the brink of love with a woman I know completely and not at all. She has a home 17,000 miles away as the crow flies. (All these seductresses in my own nefarious land, and I am utterly mad for a foreigner.) She is not the only one ever to get me, but so far she is closer to the eternal purchase than any other lady has ever been. All this said it is the same chipped tooth. My stomach hurts, my heart sinks, and overall I am lousy. God help those who must tolerate me! Oh, how I need to dance! Demons in the walls come let me feel your techno beats in a trance-like oblivion! Show me the pale shadows of your faces as I cross the sea of anonymity, careful only to touch those with a slight pulse. I can smell the stench of the living dead and only the music can hold me. I want her. Eventually we are thrown to the street. It is the same feeling for me. I want her so badly but the gods conspire against me. How can tomorrow follow this midnight of the soul? Nothing will save me. I will drown in a sea of tears, though not one shed. Instead they are suffocating me from the inside. Forgetting my feelings works, that’s all. How? Why I get lost in work, that’s how. I join the undead. There is no ritual. Just stop doing that which makes you live - feel. The neo-classical human of impeccable virtue is particularly susceptible. Finding him is like finding a four-leaf clover. When found, the urge to pick him is overwhelming. Leave him in the earth! I will not die but perforce! Take me from this Earth and put me on the pavement of a dark, dripping metropolis. I can tolerate the gargoyles and buzzards circling in anticipation. The stone weariness makes me harder but I can’t fight the feeling. Thank goodness it is too late for me. In this brave new world I will have peace; I will have love; I will have solitude. I can wait, wait happily without fear or worry. I want her. She knows that. Should the dead conspire to keep us apart, my goddess will surely appear in another shape and form. And this time we will have children.
Published in