God, Sex and Love

I’m sitting here alone in my room after dark, with only one standing lamp giving off a sunday evening glow.  If you were here and the night became still, I’d have you tell me stories about your childhood.  Your soft warm voice would put my worrisome mind at ease.  I want to know you better, and to have you trust me like old friends do.  Its so strange, I feel as if I’ve always known you, perhaps it was in a different time or place—or maybe a thousand lifetimes ago, your face is so familiar, like those in my dusty old photo-album that stare out at me from yellowed snapshots, leaving me with that sad aching feeling deep inside my chest, a mourning for days lost and moments that have placidly slipped by, unnoticed except for my thread-worn memories and aging keepsakes.  At times the past feels as if it just occurred yesterday and then at other times, it feels like all these random events belong to another person from a different lifetime, do you know what I mean?——Maybe we once wandered down dark rainy streets of some unremarkable small town in the midwest, surrounded by an ocean of corn fields—ducking into smokey old taverns with the jukebox playing the likes of Merle Haggard, pool-balls cracking and the local yahoos giving us that familiar glare that says, “What the fuck are you two outcasts doing in here?”—-do you think this is possible?  I do—but I’m a poet and a dreamer and such dubious notions occur to me all the time——-maybe you don’t know what I am trying to say and perhaps you never will—-but for now, we can share our stories and see where they leads us.

I imagine you cooking us supper, preparing it with those immaculate small hands of yours; hands connected to your arms and then to your body and finally to a heart beating deep inside of you.  And I can see you smiling as you go about adding this and that to your unwritten recipe. Evening closes in and the kitchen is filled with that comforting aroma of seasoned dishes simmering on the stove, it smells like home.  It’s no big deal to you, but as for me, I’m enjoying the tenderness that comes with being fussed over.  I don’t know how you do these things, mixing all those mysterious spices and ingredients together, but I believe that sharing food is an act of love—

I watch you move thru space with an effortless grace; with athleticism and agility—oppressive gravity is envious of your dancers finesse. Unlike me, I trip over my own untied shoelaces. I dance like I cook—horribly.  I lumber, I lurch, and then stumble——as I trample across the crumbling ground of my faltering days.  My refuge has always been found in the eloquence of words, even on those darkest of nights when sleep eludes me, I am able to blend them silently together inside my frenzied head like watercolors that beautifully bleed and melt into one another.  The sharing of words is also an act of love. It’s really all I’ve ever had to offer anyone.

I remember on a whim you and I headed up north on highway 1.   The road traced along the rocky coastline, and everything was as it should be, with you sitting in the passenger seat smiling as the radio played the song Hero. Across bridges and up hill and dale we carried on as the rain fell on our windshield making the world appear blurry and dreamlike.  Back then, we had no plans or outside distractions, we were sorting out this thing called life in real-time—-no past, no future, just you and I naively melding into one—and so it went—so on and so forth….forever and a day….and for the time being, that was good enough. 

We holed up in a dumpy sea weathered motel and drank cheap wine, ate cheese with sour dough-bread and made love. Outside the world was dreary and gray with a damp fog blowing in off the sea.  We had nothing to do or nowhere to go, so we drank more wine and shared our secrets about God, sex and love.  We took walks on the windy beach until we were soaked and tired and then we went back to our musty old hotel room to talk.  I lit a candle and we stared at our shadows on the wall as the the flame flickered, we shared our thoughts in hushed voices, quietly falling in love, with the divine surprise of stone being sculpted into art.

I don’t remember if it was my eighth beer or my eleventh, but somewhere along that point, I’d lost the ability to self-edit.  Who can say if it was intellect or emotion that was guiding me down a one way street,  in the wrong direction, no breaks, no pulling back——just me blindly headed straight at you.  Fuck-it, all that sober talk was getting us nowhere, I was either gonna have you, or piss you off so bad that you’d never speak to me again—I’d rather have it that way then some middle of the road, getting nowhere banal discussions about the weather.     I prefer the more unconventional conversations.