Birthday wishes from afar July 18, 2024

 

 

we are 10 days away

 from her 45th birthday

 already deep into that silliness

 people called middle age

 and I wonder how different she feels

 now than back when I interrupted

her birthday party at age 33

 how did I feel when we all thought

 nobody would trust us because

we had survive passed our 30th birthday

and later turning 45 in the mid 1990s

having traded my career

as a baker, salesman, truck driver

for a career as a scribe

while she went from scribe

to something more prestigious

 still able to take pride

in her ability to save the world

While I at 33 fell in and out of love

But always stand ins for my one true love

while she, perhaps, is finding and losing love too

 then embracing aging as an accomplishment

email to Al Sullivan

Inside and out June 20, 2015

 

I want to be on the inside and outside at the same time, to feel what you feel as I feel it, tender, then rough, to move and feel my movement inside you, stirring something to life inside both of us.

I want to hear what you hear, what my voice sounds like in your ears, not just the sweet talk, but the real talk we both need to hear.

I want to see what you see, through your eyes, not just when you look at me, but at the world, what visions come to me at this time of day or that.

I want to taste what you taste, the sip of wine, the kiss, the oyster you take into your mouth whole.

I ache to be you, your mouth full of things I need, I need to feel, see, hear, taste all you do, so, I might know you fully from the inside out, the only way I’ll ever know who you really are.

email to Al Sullivan

Variations of Antony and Cleopatra (2014)

  

In my salad days, I was green in judgement, perhaps cold in blood, knowing that the stroke death is  as a lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired, and her music, moody food for us, who trade love, and I come to understand that she makes the most hungry where she most satisfies, and I need use my lips to gently pry her open, to lie beside her, with her, within her, knowing that when she leaves this world so much vanishes with her going.

I have Immortal longings in me:  The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip: I am fire and air; my other elements. I give to baser life.  Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. While I continue to wrestle with you in my strength of love.

In time we hate that which we often fear. We are ignorant of ourselves, begging for what harms us most, and our inner wiser nature denies us these things for our own good, and so it is profitable for us to lose this voice, those prayers, and for what good turn: “For the best turn of the bed.”

And when I kiss her, the first and last of many, I taste her orient pearl, desperate to think that desolation does begin to make a better life, and for her, now, seeing her true love vanish. Let him forever go.

email to Al Sullivan

Forbidden zone Sept. 2, 2014

 

This is when I miss Jerry Lewis most, seeing him exhausted, the haze from the cigarette dangling from his mouth, reminding me of my life at home with my uncles and the haze of cigarettes hanging from their mouths.

I walk beside the river and look over at the skyline and that cluster of skyscrapers among which was one where the telethon took place, recalling my Labor Day trips there, and my standing outside on the sidewalk waiting for my group’s turn to go inside.

Now everything seems empty, someone else’s face where the famous comedian’s once was, and I wonder at how we keep losing things we love, how important pieces of our lives vanish, not appreciating them when they still were here, love being the most terrible loss of all.

I stroll along the riverfront walkway at the bottom of the cliffs, seeking out in this landscape for what was most recently lost, the massive bulk of history hanging over me, the while house that leads to her street, a forbidden zone I must avoid or come too close to, lost but not forgotten, most acute at this end of season when all things begin to fade.

 

email to Al Sullivan

A blind man feeling his way April 2012

 

 I was never this giddy even at 16

when I fell in lust with my science teacher

 who was dating the head coach of the football team,

 all I could do then was stare,

,now I post silly things on her Facebook page

 she tells me I should take down

since her whole family

 and her most trusted friends

will see it and know what going on

(if anything really is).

What the hell am I thinking?

Why can't I stop?

This is not natural,

 the way puberty was back then,

 the normal progression of a boy

 entering into his teens rather

re-defining for me what people

mean when they say second childhood,

 this need to feel out my way in a fog

 of my own creation,

 to know if what I see is real,

 to touch it, to know if it is soft or hard,

 hot or cold,

 there or not there,

 like a blind man gauging reality by touch.

 

email to Al Sullivan

Heart and brain Dec. 10, 2012

  

How do I tell my heart to forget her, something my brain can’t even do, unforgiven, unmasked, left without her at last?

How do I forget what I thought she might possess, the warmth in the chill of night?

How do forget her light, alas at last she is rid of me?

How much darker the night becomes without her light?

How do I keep on when all is done, she is gone, when she is shed of me already?

How do I convince my hear all is over, when my brain tells me it is not so, when it is clear she must go, has gone, won’t return, my heart still beating too many beats at the thought of her, my eyes still see her place where she sat, my brain convinced she is no longe there, but my heart does not buy it, defies it, beats madly as if she still is?

How do I convince this miscreant heart to accept it, to forget it, even when my brain already has, brain telling heart to get over it, when my heart sees what it wishes to see and always will.

email to Al Sullivan

Dolphins are angels July 2, 2024

  

The gods ride the waves

On the backs of dolphin,

As I spy them from shore

Coming to me when I

Most need them,

Back then as well as now,

The same thoughts always

Running through my head

As I step into a dream scape

Each time I reach the sea,

The ghosts of the past

Lingering on the sand,

The way foam lingers

With the receding waves,

And I search the choppy

Surface of the sea

For signs from the all mighty.

Looking to distinguish

The rough surface from

The dark shapes,

Gods coming to me on their backs

When ever I plead for relief,

In good times or bad.

Coming up out of the depths

As if just for me.

 

email to Al Sullivan