24 december

how one forgets how warm and wonderful it is, the slippery softness of papery clean flesh on flesh. how one forgets that synthesis of brain and bone--!

We sit proverbially, the warm-eyed and red-nosed, in the warm neccessity of too-little-room and too-many-hands; the beautifully effervescent young-people that small children gape at with wide eyes in restaurants. The waitress is gloomy, the clean round tips of two new cigarettes poking wearily from the lining of her apron-pocket; the blonde boy next to me orders "water, with ice".

In the lucid plural blackness of downtown-- lights ping their unintelligible morse code, like frivolous sequins all red and blue and peach and green in the black lining of a sensible man's coat. i am a soap bubble, a sudsily new-baby pink and gloriously impermeable soap bubble, my feet slapping loudest against the greenly grey concrete. if this is life, half-heard, half-seen, half-smelled, "let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand"; let me never cease to rip and to slash and to live. life is a blood-orange tangerine whose peel i rip off hungrily, hungrily. if it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"-- we are idiots, every one of us; nine beautiful luxurious idiots. how much better it is to be happy than wise! and how feverishly, feverishly happy.

"a moment of silence," declares Frank, by the river-- the blameless benevolence of the plain pocked moon reflects blue-black scales on the lascivious skin of the water. we lay crookedly, the hard white polyps of concrete on the curve of my back, watching the wicks of the stars float by. lying face-up-- each star virginally clinquant, sewn like a button into the worn black wool of the sky. constellations crinkle groggily overhead, spattered in pink-and-orange paroxysms of clean cold embroidery thread; a blurred maternal diety baking me into its crisp virginal pound-cake of soapy cleanness and freedom.

And i am here, and now, and this is my insignificant reality: to be bludgeoned to sleep by too-many-bodies in the warm fleshy backseat of a silver Honda, serenaded by the porous ruffle of beautiful voices through which seeps the anesthetic sweetness of Sufjan Stevens. if this is life.... Lord, if this is life.