The rise of spring

04/08/80

Spring comes on me like I’m freshly woken and still groggy, the long winter’s stubble clinging to my face in need of a shave, a rough world over which I cannot pass my hand without pain.

The naked branches still shiver in the still cool breeze, as winter refuses to completely relinquish its hold, gone but hardly forgotten, its bitter taste lingering on the tip of my tongue as I ache for the first buds to fill in the spaces left empty on the tree limbs by the cold.

I do not love spring the way I love autumn, even though spring brings rebirth and fall, dying – we deluded by the spread of color we get all at once in the fall, while spring creeps up on us, teasing us with a spattering of color here or there, the purple or yellow of crocuses oozing up from the frozen bodies of dead leaves.

I ache for it to come more quickly, feeling the stir of it inside my bones, the rise of it up my spine, the tingle of it at the tips of my fingers.

But on mornings like this, it comes as a shock, like a face full of cold water, a rude, abrupt awakening that shakes me by the shoulders and reminds me life comes with pain, reminds me – after a long winter huddled inside – that I am still alive.

And I ache for Autumn’s kiss, even though I know deep down it is a prince charming’s kiss that eases me into a sleep I may not awaken from, while spring kicks me in the teeth and wakens me, and makes me search this barren landscape of life for those first few signs of life, the buds that eases from the tips of each branch, a bitter smile grinning down at me, bringing a still chill rain upon my upturned face.

Fear at dusk

(from City) Oct. 10, 1978 Jack-the-ripper fog light wavers on these greasy streets,A shimmer on the steel teeth of closed grocers’ gatesA fire light that whispers over the pavement under my feetCatching on the leaking oil left by rusting automobilesSpreading as if caused by each step I take in this early nightTrash spills out from the broken gates of the Red and WhiteLike escaping prisoners with no guard to contain themYet as alone as I am under the glow of this dying dayAnd as threatened by the hidden dangers of dusk,Roaming wolves of the ghetto watching from deep shadowsEach passing face like mine a victim to a lottery of crimePoor savaging poor because the rich are too remote,Yet with pathetic returns that keep them at it,Each face I pass in the dark scarred with a Zorro strokeThe dread that always comes at this time of nightWe all the canvas for this bloody graffiti,Like the walls of the church or the undersides of windowsEach a permanent mark left on each psycheAs we all huddle against the chill afraid to breathe  

The Lady in the Yellow Volkswagen

04/07/80

I didn’t know at first who she was, only that she passed and waved every day when I jogged up River Drive.

Had I recognized the face behind the wheel I might not have waved back for shame. But in the fog of waking and running and feeling the end of winter wind blowing into my face, she remained a morning mystery I ached to see, like seeing the first crocus of spring, a yellow kiss in passing that stirred up my blood in a way the jogging could not.

The first time, I heard the beep and saw no face at all, just a blur of blonde hair, and her lifted hand, red fingernail polish flashing with the reflected sunlight.

Even later, when I saw her passing me going one way while I went the other, I did not know I knew her from elsewhere, and simply waved and watched her wave back, always a flash of fingernails or shimmering lips.

She did not stop or pull over; she went her way and I went mine, leaving me not in a trail of dust, but of lust I could not satisfy.

Then one night, at the bar when I was working for the band, the blonde-haired Michelle pulled me aside and asked how my jogging was going, jogging a memory and a connection that stunned me into silence, and finally my managing to utter: “You’re the girl from yellow Volkswagen, and she nodded.

She was more than that – striking something up inside of me from two directions at once, like a match finally finding a striker to rub against, she the face behind the wheel, but also the girl from the kitchen months before that, who I’d stared for most of a party while she played a game not too different from chess with a dozen other men in the room, all of them completing for her attention, all trying – as I tried – not to stare too boldly as the swell of her breasts from the too-low-cut dress she wore, or the nipples against the fabric that stood too well out for anyone to miss.

If she looked at me that night, it was no more attention that she would have paid to a pawn, a figure she could move across the board in order to better position herself to capture one of the pieces she desired, pieces also poised to fall when she as queen swept them up.

And even then, each time she looked at me I choked, and forced myself to look in some other direction although from her stare I knew she knew where exactly I’d been looking, and her smile hinted at a playful thought of letting me have it, if only to further tease the heavyweights in the room all of whom believed they deserved her and intended to have her, and would be utterly dumbfounded if I wound up with her instead.

A passing thought, yes, and perhaps one that might have become a night to remember, as it later became anyway, because a pawn doesn’t like being used as a pawn, even if he becomes lucky in the process. And the more she looked at me, the more terrified and resentful I became and the more she seemed to see me as someone worth pursuing, her polished red fingernails playing along the edge of the blouse, easing under the silk just where her breasts swelled, coming dangerously close to exposing the nipple, her gaze locked onto me, pupils filled with promises of delights I could easily imagine for anyone else but me.

I wanted to be cool, and pretended to be immune, trying hard to play the game the really cool cats in the room played, trying to pretend I did not need what she offered, and resisted, and then, she frowned, and her gaze moved on, focusing on some other pawn more willing if no more desperate than I was to be used.

Pauly later tried to console me, telling me I didn’t want to be one of the crowd, an implied insult against her I could not accept, wanting more than anything to be one of them, to be used and abused by her, and to remember it later, only I had lost my chance.

And here she was again, later, at a different bar, touching my shoulder, letting me buy her a drink, telling me how sorry she was we hadn’t managed to hook up back then – and I believed her, although still too late since she no longer played that chess game, but had already check-mated her king, the diamond engagement ring glittering as brightly on her finger as her eyes had that night, as if she had transferred some of her passion into the finely cut stone.

“It’s really too bad,” she said, leaving me only to nod, and in the days that followed, wave to her as she passed me on River Drive, her yellow VW Bug vanishing behind me as if part of a dream.

Every man’s dream

February 19, 1977

“I can’t stop, and never get enough,” my friend, Edward tells me at the Red Baron slow night when I came early to set up the band equipment.

I’ve known him since high school, when he ached for it, just another dweeb from the audio-visual department with thick black glasses and a tendency to wear pocket protectors.

These days, he can’t chase women away, and he complains about it in those rare moments when women aren’t crowding around him at the bar.

“I know you think I’m crazy,” he said. “I have a real problem here and I don’t know how to work it out.”

I try not to look incredulous when he says this because I remember all too well how girls hated him in school and used to mock him from his face full of pimples, he claimed then came from not getting anything at all.

I wasn’t much better then, spouting poetry that won all the less popular girls when l wanted the girls, he wanted but wanted no part of either of us.

Now, in his early 30s like I am, he gets any woman he wants while I still spout poetry, and still know I’m not in the upper crust even in a dive bar like this.

I remember a time when Eddy couldn’t say hello to a girl without sputtering and spitting like a rotted garden hose; while he still stutters, women find it quaint – and I’m aching to find out what changed. Did he come up with a fairy godmother that waved a wand over his head?

“God if I know,” he says when I ask. “It’s as big a mystery to me as to anybody else. But when it happened, I over indulged at little. Wouldn’t you? I was for so long starved for affection that when someone smiled at me, I melted. It was very, very addictive. All I wanted was to get my share before all these pretty women woke up and saw me for who and what I was and went back to the jocks and rich jerks they had before. The problem is – it never stopped. The more I got; the more women came to me, and worse, the more I wanted. I was drowning in women and most people thought I loved every bit of it.”

Then, he looks at me and laughs, and tells me I have the look he’s seen on the faces of other men since, a look almost as addictive as the sex.

“When other guys saw the quality of women I was getting, they started looking at me like that, too,” he says. “It’s the way we used to look at the jocks at school. These guys wondered like you wonder what I have that makes women fall for me the way they do.”

Men started hanging around him hoping whatever he had would rub off on them.

I ask if he came into a lot of cocaine; he shakes his head.

“I only wish it was that simple,” he says.

Then at some point, he didn’t like it any more.

“When I tried to tell people, no one would believe me,” he says. “The fact is, it stopped being fun and started becoming a burden. As my reputation grew, women started telling other women, and I found women pulling me aside everywhere. I had no private moment.

Worse, men stopped admiring me and started wondering if maybe I was messing with their women: husbands, fathers, brothers, sons all gave me that same look warning me without words that they’d beat the crap out of me if they found out I was messing with the women they loved. Worse, it was true.”

It got to the point where he could no longer look some men in the eye, knowing he had been with their wives, their sisters, their daughters, mothers – and even in some cases, their grandmothers.

“Some men found out. Most didn’t,” he says. “I no longer had any man I could call a friend. Not that it mattered much since most of my time was taken up with women, who sought me out, day and night, a work or at home, or even while I was on the street.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I got married,” he says. “I figured this would discourage them.”

“And did that work?”

“Not in your life,” he says. “In fact, my vows seemed to increase my value to some women, who thought I had become even more fascinating since now our copulating involved some measure of intrigue. Every woman wanted to prove something – the old ones seeing me as a way of making them feel young; the young girls using me to feel mature. All of them seemed to suck the life out of me, leaving me a hollow shell no amount of alcohol or drugs could fill.”

“Perhaps you need to see someone,” I say. “I mean professional help.”

“I tried,” he says. “That lasted right up to the point in which the male doctors found me involved with their wives or I got involved with the female doctors. I went right through the whole profession without getting an ounce of cure.”

“So, what do you do?”

“I walk around like a ghost,” he said. “Most men that know me hate me. Those who don’t know me admire me. But everybody, male or female thinks I’m living high – when all I really want is for all this to stop.”

When a rose is a rose

 (Warning: adult language and content)

  

My fingers touch the cracked glass panel of the host house, the rough edge moist with warm condensation.

You and I have come here alone after the owner in the main house told us the whole building contained bright red roses.

Your reflection shimmers in the wed glass as your hands reach out into the room of red, you gingers brushing against the crimson petals like a child’s through water.

You stir them up, increase the intense scent of rose flavor in the air, though even this cannot hide the scene of you and the intensity of desire your smell stirs up in me.

Yu wear a tight white blouse and a short black shirt, both so damp I can see your outline as if you strolled through this sea of red petals naked.

Pearls of moisture break out on your forehead, each very visible when I come near you.

We do not look at each other, but at the petals.

We do not touch each other, but continue to touch the silk-like surface of each flower, admiring out open to the center each is, how thick with pollen and invitation.

I am beyond myself with desire for you, aching to lay you down and ease myself into you as if I am a bee seeking your nectar.

I settle first for a casual brush of my hand against your breast as I reach across you to touch a particularly beautiful rose.

No brush has ever caused me such anguish, sending through my hand and then through the rest of me a shock so powerful it shakes my bones.

I know I can never been satisfied with idea talk or the occasional accidental touch.

When you turn to look the other way, I kiss your neck.

Not hard, but linger, letting my lips gather the moist dew the warm environment had inspired there.

It is salty, yet sweet, making me hunger for other tasty delights I know your body has to offer.

You turn and greet my lips with yours, and our mouths linger on each other’s, feeling out each other’s landscape as if you and I could map out the rest of our anatomy simply with this kiss.

Perhaps it is the heat or the sweet scented air, but I am drunk on you and your vapors, and I cannot help myself as my fingers rise to feel the swell of your breasts through the wet fabric of your shirt, each nipple like button like around which my fingers linger, my palms spreading out over each breast as if my hands have become flowers opening upon you, each inch of my flesh feeling the smoothness of your flesh through the coarse fabric. You are a flower I need to feel more fully as this touch makes me shake even more than my accidental touch did, my tongue pressing between your lips as my hands explore and caress you.

I lean against you, and you seem to wear a halo of roses around you, my fingers b beginning to undress you even as we kiss, one button, then the next, until I spread open your blouse and plunge my hands into direct contact with flesh.

I can feel the sparks crackle at the point of contact, and know each spark is stirring up even deeper desires in me, so that a touch is not enough and a kiss is only a promise of sweeter things I must have or die.

I can no longer think.

I am savage again deep inside, my heart pounded inside my chest like some wild beast I fear to release. But an even more savage beast stirs between my legs, all of me, out of control, demanding that I take you.

I breathe so fast I scare myself, thinking I might over heat.

My fingers fumble withy the catch to your skirt and let that drop so that you stand before me as one more naked flower into whom I must delve, from whom I already smell the scene of your honey: so thick around you I can nearly taste it.

I lay you down on a nearby table the owner has clearly used to package his flowers, soft red petals spread across it like red rain drops.

You lay across them like the most perfect rose of all, limps limp in a way I am not.

I want to touch your lips with the tip of my most painful part. I want to ease it into your mouth so you might ease my pain. But I find a rose instead, holding it above your face by the stem so that the tip of its petals lingers on your lips like a kiss, your tongue easing out as the slightest touch.

My mouth replaces the rose. My tongue presses through your lips and into your mouth as if I could suck the nectar out of you in one long lingering kiss, though I know now how out of control I am, and how I must have you, and cannot stop myself from having you, even as some inner rational voice tells me to stop.

I do stop, but only to take up the rose again moving its petals down you to touch the tip of each of your nipples, easing you until you moan and then when you moan enough, my mouth replacing the rose again to suck those nipples, too, first one, then the other, again with me as a savage struggling to hold myself back.

Finally, I stop again, move the rose down to the heart of you, my free hand spreading your legs as I use the flower to kiss the most precious flower of all.

A thorn pricks my finger.

Drops of red blood like rose petals drip on your thigh.

My tongue laps these up then keeps on going, moving up to where the flower has been, me needing you, wanting you, but using only my tongue to go where the rest of me desperately needs to go.

I taste you, so sweet and salty that no flower is its equal.

I am a starving man finding the place where ancient gods feed, and I feed there, too, carefully feeling out each crevice with the tip of my tongue, as I am a rose, too, ready to explode in petals and seed.

It is all too much for me to handle.

The savage beast deep inside of m, full of desires that no thinking man can control, no rules can bind, takes over me in a rush of shutters, so that I strip myself naked, too, allowing the part of me with the greatest of pain to seek out the place in your of the greatest of pleasure, me plunging into you bee-like into your moist depths again and again, and again until at last, I explode with honey.

Girl in a bath towel

     

   

December 15, 1972

She knocks on my door

With nothing on

But a bath towel

The nipples of her small breasts

So hard I can see them

Sticking like bullets 

Through the terry cloth

A pale reflection

of me in my jeans,

a stunned unintentional voyeur

though I have seen her

from time to time

slipping naked from bathroom

to her room down the hall

a burglar hoping someone

might steal her virginity,

telling me as she shivers 

in the hall’s hefty drafts

that she locked herself out 

of her room this time,

and asking if she can use mine

until someone, anyone later

might tell the landlord 

to come up with the spare key,

her large dilated eye

begging me to take her in

just as she is taking me in,

She, 18, and on her own

For the first time in her life,

While I’m still aching

Over the whole life

I’ve already lived at 22,

Caught between two conflicting 

Types of pain,

My knees trembling 

As if I’m the one naked in the hall

As if I’m the one who needs her

To take me in, swallow me up

And make me feel whole again,

Me, desperate to tear away 

The imaginary bath towel

I wear,

Until we are both equally naked

Until we are both whole again.

Robert De Niro

Are you talkin to me?

He says when staring in the mirror

only this time he isn’t pretending to be

a crazy taxi driver.

this time he's trying to be

some Hollywood tough guy

Like Cagney or Bogart

his ugly face coming up

on my Twitter feed

like a disease doctors

can't find a cure for

he actually thinks

he can punch the president in the face

or bring down the MF as he says

does he have a script for this fantasy

Does he have to rehearse

needing to work on the tough-guy expression
in order to get it just right

or the average American to take for seriously

We all know how full of it he is

He's the guy we keep seeing

playing these roles on TV or in the movies

and yet always we know

somewhere in the back of his head

he has doubts he can't live up to the part

are you talkin to me?

he asks again staring in the mirror
Pretending to see the president

reflected back

When he’s only seeing

Himself

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