Adirondack

I imagined her.

I imagined that she was with me as I sat in the observation car of the Amtrak Adirondack 69 travelling from New York City to Montreal and saw from the corner of my eye as a bearded man let his wife/girlfriend lean her arm casually against him. Now he puts his arm around her white, freckled shoulder and she leans against his yellow summer shirt, and I imagined holding your hand self-consciously; it shall have to be self-conscious, unfortunately: I have been indoctrinated by the twin, disparate influences of pseudo-modern Indian social consciousness and Paul McCartney’s more self-effacing songs (as if His Lordship ever had to hide his love away).

On either side of the train stretches lake – the Great Lakes of our childhood American history books. The August wind wrinkles the membrane of the Lake, upon which graze weekend fishing boats and bits and pieces of driftwood from the trees that rim the lake like emerald mascara – remnants of a long-forgotten storm or hurricane.

Wrinkles. I wonder what it would be like to grow old with you. I catch the thought.

This is what I want to do. Ride with you in the train from New York City to Montreal and sit in the observation car and drink tiny cups of coffee and see the light rain leave skid marks on the rounded forward-swept windows and watch the bald eagles take off from the makeup trees in sweeping bursts of American symbolism and wave to old gentlemen who watch the train go by from their weekend boats, wearing sunglasses and meaningful paunches.

By the time we gain the legitimacy to travel together, alone, in offhand places, our lives shall be spoken-for and given names to and our relationships shall have a destination, coherent points of departure and arrival, a direction. Now when we can meander like elven spirits among the woods of the Great Lakes of North America and the untamed spaces between us and be true to our wanderlust that swells like a balloon under our solar plexus insisting on consummation, we are separated by Time and Distance and Overreaching Ambition. Never enough time to take each other’s touch for granted. Every second fought for and accounted for and saved up like pressed flowers in the too-rapidly-flipping blank pages of our mind’s scrapbook, while Desire slowly fades under the over-bright sun and we live out old vows for the sake of old memories.

And all this time the train chugs up the East Coast of North America and all the natural beauty – the soaring birds, the lakes and beautiful puddles and the lovely and dark and deep woods and the yellow autumn flowers and the yellow t-shirts and the freckles – is being left behind.

…

The overcast sky drips through holes in its fabric.

Pain

Pain.

Possessing
My mind, like
A breathless touch.

Becoming the core of my consciousness
Driving out everything else.
And yet

It has a melody of its own.
I listen in feverish fascination
As it leads me through troughs
And peaks and
Salty ravines.
It is ennobling
In its obliteration.

It makes me want to scream.
But that is unbecoming of a gentleman.
So I breathe instead.

A roiling ocean of lead
And I'm but a boat.

...

They stuck five needles
Into the roof of my mouth
And the numbness bubbled
And spread through my face;
So hot 
that it felt cold, like the touch
of your index,
so many months ago.

...

A roiling ocean of lead
And I'm but a boat.

Regret

Don’t get me wrong –

I’m happy I’m here, drifting in your arms-chest-neck as we whisper our love (for fear of overzealous adults); I am happy, yet somehow it seems that I was happier still months back, when I was lost in wistful contemplation of this very summer afternoon; then, when outside it had raged anemic, and Desire had not known where to exhaust herself.  Your

Phantasm then had seemed yet more vigorously alive, real, stirring with animation, and your lips had been heavily pregnant. And

I had been happier still, lying with you on the silver screen of my feverish famished imagination, than I am now, with the merely-satisfied present: where the minutes fall heavy and mute from totalitarian clocks. I

Had been convinced, then, that I should explode on meeting you – thus released convulsively from the thrusting, expanding tension straining against the confines of my skull; that my eyes should melt from the heat of your presence, from seeing you in a place other than the marshes of my facile dreams; and yet:

Here I am, and here you are, and

I am adrift in impotent poetry.

Impoverished senses of mine; incompetent! Incapable of keeping up with the battering-ram of your presence, choose this virile hour to turn dull and philistine. Oh, that I shall peer upon this day down the looking-glass of Idle Recollection, seated upon the stale and mildly uncomfortable armchair of Nostalgia, and berate myself bitterly for not:

Pressing you harder to my breast, that a sliver of you

May diffuse into me, and for not

Entwining inextricably with your

Arms-legs-neck, that

A solitary flutter of your

Eyelashes against my right cheek

Forever beats

As a butterfly against the confines of

My stomach, and for not

Losing my fingers and resolve in your Tagore-scented hair.

Chrysopoeia

My love is pewter.

Given to base grunting, and rude
And crude
Expressions of vulgar desire.
Bite the stannic apple.

Part your
Hair and whisper in your creamy ear
Forbidden nothings.
Watch you squirm and undulate
Under the influence
Of Scandal™ (that mutable aphrodisiac).

Laying the slushy foundation for the
Oncoming bloom of
Flowers of consummated passion.

Nurture with a caressing word.

Until the ancient madness that courses through
Our veins comes to a head:
Waters the lakegarden, exhausts itself.

And out of the dirt, beauty.
Out of the mud, a quivering lotus.

Almost immediately despising its roots --
A saint rising on verdure nobility of birth above
the condescended huddled filthy masses.

Pure, friable, innocent, prodigal.

The urgency eases cataclysmically into a benign, golden mood, and
The alchemy is complete. 

Crystals

This sweet agony that stems from my
Nucleus accumbens -
Down my spine
Down the veins of my right arm
Down to you.

This touch -
A feather tickling a hole into a corner of my
Brain;
Oh.
Oh would it that I could
Capture one or two of these tumbling, fumbling 
Pleasure crystals and save them for
A moonless day,
When the lack of a person streams in through
The blind-ed windows, and
When my midnight coffee foxtrots
With my restless tongue,
And the smell of wetness just won't go away.

Back Home

The sun is violent.
He splays corpses of your fingers across
My lips;
Blurry gray scars spear across
My face
And the furrows grow deeper

As the day ages.

We are drawn in graphite,
And time is smudging Us.

Your kohl’d brown eyes have
Cold, mischievous tiger-tints to them

That I have never seen before;

What defining, independent memories are they

In possession of, that they hint of such

Depth?

Your tresses still fall on tip-toes

On my chest, my neck, my face;

Curling, burning tongs that tease!

Yet if I look closely enough

I can just make out the flecks of maturing

White, where there was earlier only stubborn

Solidity.

We are drawn in graphite,
And time is smudging Us.

I am caught in the rainbow-strings that

Are woven in-between your refracting spectacles.

I used to shimmer effervescent in

The levity of the twin mirrors they shield:

Now I can drown myself

In the liquid complexity of my rendered reflection.

I can see myself, and

Then you again, and then me again;

We’re locked in the infinity

Of a shared look.

The sunlight finds relief in

Depressions that weren’t there before;

Ridges that were full;

Confident laughter where there was unsure timidity;

A measured step where there was puerile unboundedness;

Layered inflections of speech compete on your tongue; speech

That was earlier unhewn, and now bounces

On polished wheels.

Wrapped in the cocoon of our minds, we

Are changing.

I gaze in wonder at this woman

Who is the living image of the gurgling girl

I fell in love with, so many sunsets ago.

We are drawn in graphite,

And time is smudging us

And is adding new squiggles

And shifting colour and definitive

Lines; we are changing

And it shall take time to learn how

To love this new person – maybe a

Day or two.

And then we shall frolic in each other’s

Minds, as we did before.

…

I kiss your concerned lips as they ask

Why I look so thoughtful, and grasp you in a hug;

Maybe if I hold you close enough, for

Long enough,

We shall diffuse into each other

And fate shall grant Us amnesty.

…

Your house catches fire,

As the sun gloriously climaxes

And orange juice spills all over the linen of

The sky, staining,

And the world burns in frenzied animation

For a few minutes, until the night

Douses everything in cool darkness.

why not

the lack of a person storms in through the blinded windows like a moonless night or a jar of unrhyming cello notes sprinkled upon the ground and stared at or a tear drop given birth to and abandoned or a child stabbing an electric socket with a fork over and over and over again until the socket keels over and dies or an old man who exists only in my head or me sitting and trying to justify and rationalize the mundanity of this post-sadness day as an event to be built upon, the foundations of what the adult world calls maturity maybe i wish i could just stay enveloped in a hazy daydream