Kids parade the streets like flocks of geese, the same
sound, only unlike summer, their coming and going more predictable, tied to
school buses rather than a change of season, their world changed dramatically
from when I was their age, a strange alignment of planets, the advent of new technology,
carrying cell phones the way Dick Tracy did his watch, familiar faces on the screens
to whom they talk, school boys dressing up punk, school girls so utterly
provocative as to make the nuns who taught me cringe, their lives dictated by a
whole new code I’m still shocked by, coming together and pulling apart in ways
that I never imagined at their age, bliss letting them paint whatever vision
they want, while I’m stuck in the past, wishing I could go back or grow up, or
to have known what they already know.
Is throbs, just not always from the same place or for the same reason.
I can cure with a few strokes.
I don't always want to relieve it, needinh to feel it, needing to need it even though that is no longer possible with her, to keep on throbbing, to feel the need when I close my eyes and remember her
I don't always want the pain to cease, feeling it making me realize I am still alive, this throbbing so entangle, so connected with visions of her, a few strokes and it vanishes, when I do not want it to vanish, embracing it just as I embrace her as a ghost, that throb reminding me of all I hope for, and will never get, and yet feel as if I have, each time it consumes me, my head filled with the fog of it , a need so desperate otherwise I would not be alive
A day after the parade the streets are still littered with
bits of green, and high hopes for spring, glittering green, steamers and hats,
empty glasses, the cheer mere echoes in the distance, as the real world regains
its grip, and we all slip back into the day to day routines we can only momentarily
forget, few others along this street taking notices, already forgotten, as are
many of those of us who partook, this spring ritual lacking the maypoles around
which to dance, and those who we would still dance with, given a chance
Even now I’m tempted to touch it, when I think of her, just
as I did on those dark nights, texting leading to touching, even when she could
not see what I did on my end of the thing, unable to see what I saw, what I
still see sometimes, what inspired me.
I ought to be over all this like an invalid that should have
recovered as time moves on, Mostly I am, except on some nights when it all
comes out again, like a ghost, and my fingers crawl across fabric and try to
touch it again, and again I think of her, in the dark, in the dead of night, no
texts to stir me up, only memories, and wishes that won’t ever come true, stirred
up, while I can’t keep it down any more
I’ve felt this way before, if not recently, then just acutely,
living with the duel feelings that come watching (or thinking about) another
man fucking the woman (women) I love.
This intense sense of helplessness, mingled with an odd
sexual throb, like a fan at a sporting event getting off when other team
scores.
Some men like me thrive on it, finding pleasure in watching or
thinking of it happening, tied and gagged in the corner of the bedroom as this
man, any man, friend, enemy or complete stranger takes the plunge, and she –
the one we love, the one who once loved us, laps it all up, moaning as the
bedposts pound the wall.
I got a twinge of this when she sent me that dark photo of
her friends in her apartment, as if I knew one or more of them would be pounding
the bedposts there, and my imagination filled in the pieces, maybe an illusion,
maybe unreal, but stirring up the horror of and the pleasure of thinking she
was being fucked.
This feel grew worse when I realized I had been replaced, a
cuck forced to watch as she made time with my boss, and then later his boss,
trickling her way up, when I ached to be the one hovering over her in the dark.
Pleasure and pain mingling in my blood, boiling up in me,
making me cringe while at the same time pressing that spot inside me that brings
that strange and pleasant pain, the only greater torture of my possibly being
tied up in that room and forced to watch, gagged to keep me from interrupting their
pleasure, and perhaps she loving the idea that I ached so much and could do so
little – this same intensity that time I left her at the bar, when she – just a
little drunk – flirted with the bartender, and I, the cuck that I am, sat on
the barstool beside her, unable to do anything except, finally, desperately,
perhaps wrongly, got up and left, later hearing her scream at me on the
telephone asking “Why did you leave me?”
Maybe I should have accepted it, taken the pain, enjoyed the
odd pleasure of watching her go home with him instead of me.
